Quote:
Originally Posted by geoking66
I'm forwarding this with the fact I dislike both Obama and Romney and am voting for Gary Johnson (but it's NY, so my vote doesn't matter). This came up all over Facebook and haven't seen it anywhere else:
Who Is The Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower? Would You Believe It's Barack Obama? - Forbes
Apparently Obama is the slowest spender on an annualised rate. However, the fundamental math problem here is that each president starts at a different budget level and percents change as a result. For example:
If President A increases the deficit from $1 to $10 (+$9), that's a 900% increase, but if President B increases the deficit by the same amount to $19, that's only a 90% increase. To get the same 900% increase, President B would have to spend an additional $900.
Anyone else find this misleading, then? Obama supporters are digging it up like gold and their lack of understanding basic math is getting to me. |
Or maybe not.
President Obama: The Biggest Government Spender In World History - Forbes
"The analysis by Internet commentator Rex Nutting on which Obama based his claim begins by telling us “What people forget (or never knew) is that the first year of every presidential term starts with a budget approved by the previous administration and Congress.”**Not exactly.
The previous administration, or President,*proposes*a budget.**The previous Congress*approves*a budget.**And what Congress approves can be radically different from what the President proposes.
As Art Laffer and Steve Moore showed in the*Wall Street Journal*on Tuesday, President Bush began a spending spree in his term that erased most of the gains in reduced government spending as a percent of GDP achieved by the Republican Congress in the 1990s led by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in conjunction with President Clinton.**But for fiscal year 2009, President Bush in February, 2008 proposed a budget with just a 3% spending increase over the prior year.**Fiscal year 2009 ran from October 1, 2008 until September 30, 2009.**President Obama’s term began on January 20, 2009.
Recall, however, that in 2008 Congress was controlled by Democrat majorities, with Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, and the restless*Senator*Obama already running for President, just four years removed from his glorious career as a*state*Senator in the*Illinois*legislature.**As Hans Bader reported on May 26 for the*Washington Examiner, the budget*approved and implemented*by Pelosi, Obama and the rest of the Congressional Democrat majorities provided for a*17.9 percent increase*in spending for fiscal 2009!"
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