Barack Obama has lowest spending record of any recent president

[Nbadan]

If it wasn't the oil, it was the WMDs, if not that it was on humanitarian grounds nevermind far brutal dictators elsewhere. It's an ever changing story.

There were likely many reasons the Neo-Cons went after Saddam, maybe they really thought that they could set up a model democracy in the Middle East, but the oil in Iraq was supposed to pay for it regardless of the reason...instead it costs taxpayers a trillion dollars up front and its gonna keep costing us...

[Nbadan]

Bush also increased domestic spending with Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind. These extra expenditures were financed with tax-cuts. To deny Bush blew up deficits is asinine and completely dishonest.

All this said, Obama has actually been worse...

sure like to hear your justification for thinking Obama has been worse....

Obama's stimulus has created millions of private sector jobs, the Bush tax cuts were accompanied by the creation of millions of public sector jobs...this is one of the reasons Obama has kept spending down, despite a fluttering economy, the Bush tax cuts, the unfunded medicade part D and two unfunded war...instead Dubya told us to go out and spend...remember that?

[Nbadan]

this graph doesn't include Obamacare at all since that wouldn't kick in for a couple years.

You know better than the CBO?

n total, CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimate that enacting the legislation would not have any budgetary effect in fiscal year 2012, and would reduce deficits by $0.1 billion over the 2012-2013 period, $13.6 billion over the 2012-2017 period, and $48.6 billion over the 2012-2022 period. (About $1.9 billion of that $48.6 billion total would be off-budget because of effects on revenues from Social Security payroll taxes).

CBO expects that those changes would, on balance, lower costs for health care both directly and indirectly: directly, by lowering premiums for medical liability insurance; and indirectly, by reducing the use of health care services prescribed by providers when faced with less pressure from potential malpractice suits. Those reductions in costs would, in turn, lead to lower spending in federal health programs and to lower private health insurance premiums.

Because employers would pay less for health insurance for employees, more of their employees' compensation would be in the form of taxable wages and other fringe benefits. As discussed below, the bill would also increase revenues because it would result in lower subsidies for health insurance. In total, CBO and JCT estimate that enacting the legislation would increase federal revenues by about $7 billion over the 2012-2022 period.

Enacting the legislation also would reduce direct spending for Medicare, Medicaid, the government's share of premiums for annuitants under the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) program, subsidies for individuals enrolled in health insurance through health insurance exchanges, and other federal health benefits programs. CBO and JCT estimate that direct spending would decline by about $41 billion over the 2012-2022 period.

Federal spending for active workers participating in the FEHB program is included in the appropriations for federal agencies, and is therefore discretionary. The legislation would also affect discretionary spending for health care services paid by the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA). CBO estimates that implementing the legislation would reduce discretionary costs by about $1 billion over the 2012-2022 period, assuming appropriation actions consistent with the legislation.

http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43197

[Nbadan]

More recently..

The estimated net costs of expanding healthcare coverage under President Barack Obama's landmark restructuring have been reduced by $48 billion through 2021, though fewer people would be covered under private insurance plans, a new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office showed on Tuesday.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...82C19Q20120314

[Nbadan]

2010 projections versus 2012 projections...

Here’s an apples-to-apples graph of the gross spending on health-care coverage — remember, these numbers don’t take into account the Medicare cuts or other pay-fors — that the CBO predicted in March 2010 and their most recent release:



It’s up by 8 percent, mostly because the recession has made people poorer, and so the health-care law is going to have to spend more to help them get health insurance. That’s what it’s supposed to do.



The net cost, as you can see, is down slightly, mostly because Congress has tweaked some penalties.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...7FPS_blog.html

[tlongII]

AP Fact Check article.

http://news.yahoo.com/fact-check-oba...BPaDsADQ7QtDMD


FACT CHECK: Obama off on thrifty spending claim


WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is aggressively pushing the idea that, contrary to widespread belief, President Barack Obama is tightfisted with taxpayer dollars. To back it up, the administration cites a media report that claims federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since the Eisenhower years.

"Federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any president in almost 60 years," Obama said at a campaign rally Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa.

The problem with that rosy claim is that the Wall Street bailout is part of the calculation. The bailout ballooned the 2009 budget just before Obama took office, making Obama's 2010 results look smaller in comparison. And as almost $150 billion of the bailout was paid back during Obama's watch, the analysis counted them as government spending cuts.

It also assumes Obama had less of a role setting the budget for 2009 than he really did.

Obama rests his claim on an analysis by Marke ch, a financial information and news service owned by Dow Jones & Co. The analysis simply looks at the year-to-year topline spending number for the government but doesn't account for distortions baked into the figures by the Wall Street bailout and government takeover of the mortgage lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The Marke ch study finds spending growth of only 1.4 percent over 2010-2013, or annual increases averaging 0.4 percent over that period. Those are stunningly low figures considering that Obama rammed through Congress an $831 billion stimulus measure in early 2009 and presided over significant increases in annual spending by domestic agencies at the same time the cost of benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare and the Medicaid were ticking steadily higher.

A fairer calculation would give Obama much of the responsibility for an almost 10 percent budget boost in 2009, then a 13 percent increase over 2010-2013, or average annual growth of spending of just more than 3 percent over that period.

So, how does the administration arrive at its claim?

First, there's the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the official name for the Wall Street bailout. First, companies got a net $151 billion from TARP in 2009, making 2010 spending look smaller. Then, because banks and Wall Street firms repaid a net $110 billion in TARP funds in 2010, Obama is claiming credit for cutting spending by that much.

The combination of TARP lending in one year and much of that money being paid back in the next makes Obama's spending record for 2010 look $261 billion thriftier than it really was. Only by that measure does Obama "cut" spending by 1.8 percent in 2010 as the analysis claims.

The federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also makes Obama's record on spending look better than it was. The government spent $96 billion on the Fannie-Freddie takeovers in 2009 but only $40 billion on them in 2010. By the administration's reckoning, the $56 billion difference was a spending cut by Obama.

Taken together, TARP and the takeover of Fannie and Freddie combine to give Obama an undeserved $317 billion swing in the 2010 figures and the resulting 1.8 percent cut from 2009. A fairer reading is an almost 8 percent increase.

Those two bailouts account for $72 billion more in cuts in 2011. Obama supported the bailouts.
There's also the question of how to treat the 2009 fiscal year, which actually began Oct. 1, 2008, almost four months before Obama took office. Typically, the remaining eight months get counted as part of the prior president's spending since the incoming president usually doesn't change it much until the following October. The Marke ch analysis assigned 2009 to former President George W. Bush, though it gave Obama responsibility that year for a $140 million chunk of the 2009 stimulus bill.

But Obama's role in 2009 spending was much bigger than that. For starters, he signed nine spending bills funding every Cabinet agency except Defense, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security. While the numbers don't jibe exactly, Obama bears the chief responsibility for an 11 percent, $59 billion increase in non-defense spending in 2009. Then there's a 9 percent, $109 billion increase in combined defense and non-defense appropriated outlays in 2010, a year for which Obama is wholly responsible.

As other critics have noted, including former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the Marke ch analysis also incorporates CBO's annual baseline as its estimate for fiscal years 2012 and 2013. That gives Obama credit for three events unlikely to occur:

—$65 billion in 2013 from automatic, across-the-board spending cuts slated to take effect next January.

—Cuts in Medicare payments to physicians.

—The expiration of refundable tax cuts that are "scored" as spending in federal ledgers.

Lawmakers are unlikely to allow the automatic cuts to take full effect, but it's at best a guessing game as to what will really happen in 2013. A better measure is Obama's request for 2013.

"You can only make him look good by ignoring the early years and adopting the hope and not the reality of the years in his budget," said Holtz-Eakin, a GOP economist and president of the American Action Forum, a free market think tank.

So how does Obama measure up?

If one assumes that TARP and the takeover of Fannie and Freddie by the government as one-time budgetary anomalies and remove them from calculations — an approach taken by Holtz-Eakin — you get the following picture:

—A 9.7 percent increase in 2009, much of which is attributable to Obama.

—A 7.8 percent increase in 2010, followed by slower spending growth over 2011-13. Much of the slower growth reflects the influence of Republicans retaking control of the House and their budget and debt deal last summer with Obama. All told, government spending now appears to be growing at an annual rate of roughly 3 percent over the 2010-2013 period, rather than the 0.4 percent claimed by Obama and the Marke ch analysis.

[Nbadan]

Fact checking the fact check...

First, there's the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the official name for the Wall Street bailout. First, companies got a net $151 billion from TARP in 2009, making 2010 spending look smaller. Then, because banks and Wall Street firms repaid a net $110 billion in TARP funds in 2010, Obama is claiming credit for cutting spending by that much.

The combination of TARP lending in one year and much of that money being paid back in the next makes Obama's spending record for 2010 look $261 billion thriftier than it really was

So as much as conservatives like to criticize TARP, much of that money has been paid back...that's a good thing...that said, if your not going to count the revenue generated by the pay back in 2010 then you can't count the TARP expenditure in 2009 either...either way, the jobs TARP created and saved and the tax revenue it generated meant that they didn't have to dump another $200 billion to stimulate job growth and tax revenue grew...

[Nbadan]

he signed nine spending bills funding every Cabinet agency except Defense, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security.

Would these agencies have gone without funding had Obama not signed these appropriations...just because they were not funded when Obama took office does not mean they were not going to be funded at all....they were going to get funded...

[Wild Cobra]

Fact checking the fact check...



So as much as conservatives like to criticize TARP, much of that money has been paid back...that's a good thing...that said, if your not going to count the revenue generated by the pay back in 2010 then you can't count the TARP expenditure in 2009 either...either way, the jobs TARP created and saved and the tax revenue it generated meant that they didn't have to dump another $200 billion to stimulate job growth and tax revenue grew...

Right.

It was paid back from the 2008 TARP. Though it technically counts as revenue back to the government, it isn't something Obama can claim as his doing.

[boutons_deux]

TARP wasn't Hussein's doing, either. It was Goldman-Sachs Repug doing, approved by the Repug administration.

[Nbadan]

A LONG List of President Obama’s Accomplishments! With Citations!

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/05...ith-citations/

If you’re one of those folks who thinks President Obama is a “disappointment,” you haven’t been paying attention the last few years. And those of you who try to draw comparisons with the Bush Administration should put away the hallucinogens and have your memory checked. If you were in a coma for the eight Bush Years, I apologize and forgive you. But please join the real world. So far, this president has done most of what he said he would do if elected; imagine what he could have done by now if progressives had supported him and not given him a Congress that doesn’t look at him as if he’s the demon seed.

Not only is he NOT a “disappointment,” he’s pretty much the opposite. And no, I don’t just say that because he took out Osama bin Laden, helped Libya determine their own destiny for the first time in a while, and because he seems able to handle international incidents without starting a new war. The guy does nearly everything we elect a president to do, and he doesn’t brag about it constantly.

Is he perfect? No, he’s human. Does he deserve some criticism? I suppose, but I must admit I haven’t seen any complaints that were of based on anything having to do with the real world. One I can’t forgive him for is pulling Janet Napolitano out of Arizona. But the thing is, on balance, he’s mostly stellar. Besides, criticism about certain specific problems is one thing; taking on an overall “Obama sucks” meme not only has the potential to put Willard Romney into power, it’s also a lie. Just because you wanted a president who would give you a glitter-farting unicorn and didn’t quite get that doesn’t mean he’s not doing well at the job we hired him for.

[boutons_deux]

Pants on Fire Romney


An analysis published last week by Marke ch, a financial news website owned by Dow Jones & Co., compared the yearly growth of federal spending under presidents going back to Ronald Reagan. Citing figures from the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, Marke ch concluded that “there has been no huge increase in spending under the current president, despite what you hear.”

Quite the contrary: Spending has increased at a yearly rate of only 1.4 percent during Obama’s tenure, even if you include some stimulus spending (in the 2009 fiscal year) that technically should be attributed to George W. Bush. This is by far the smallest—I repeat, smallest—increase in spending of any recent president. (The Washington Post’s Fact Checker concluded the spending increase figure should have been 3.3 percent.)

In Bush’s first term, by contrast, federal spending increased at an annual rate of 7.3 percent; in his second term, the annual rise averaged 8.1 percent. Reagan comes next, in terms of profligacy, followed by George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and finally Obama, the thriftiest of them all.

The Marke ch analysis was re-analyzed by the nonpartisan watchdogs at Politifact who found it “Mostly True”—adding the qualifier because some of the restraint in spending under Obama “was fueled by demands from congressional Republicans.” Duly noted, and if Romney wants to claim credit for the GOP, he’s free to do so. But he’s not free to say that “federal spending has accelerated” under Obama, because any way you look at it, that’s a lie.


http://www.truthdig.com/report/print...mney_20120530/

Like McLiar, and Fox Repug Propaganda network, US CoC (a branch of the Repug party), Gecko offers nothing but LIES and SLANDER, with no specifics of how he would be better for America. His campaign platform will be a joke.

[coyotes_geek]

TARP wasn't Hussein's doing, either. It was Goldman-Sachs Repug doing, approved by the Repug administration.

Nonsense. Obama took time off from the Presidential campaign to go push TARP through. Barney Frank and other democrats got on TV to tell me how important Obama was to the entire process. Since we know there's no way Obama would be party to a cheap political gimmick to make himself look important it's obvious that he's just as responsible for TARP as Bush or anyone else is.

[boutons_deux]

REPUG Paulsen's TARP was a 3-pager extortion demanding $700B within 7 days, and for him to be free of oversight by legislative or judicial authorities, OR ELSE (bring down the economy). Paulsen worked for the Repug Exec, which didn't kill it. Congress did modify it, but it was Repug plan from the beginning.

btw, the $700B was later to be a number they pulled out of their asses.

[TeyshaBlue]

lol @ blindbot

[coyotes_geek]

REPUG Paulsen's TARP was a 3-pager extortion demanding $700B within 7 days, and for him to be free of oversight by legislative or judicial authorities, OR ELSE (bring down the economy). Paulsen worked for the Repug Exec, which didn't kill it. Congress did modify it, but it was Repug plan from the beginning.

btw, the $700B was later to be a number they pulled out of their asses.

So Obama is a liar for attempting to take credit for a republican plan. Thanks for setting the record straight on that.

[TeyshaBlue]

Logic bomb goes Boom.

[boutons_deux]

TARP basically worked, no matter who started it.

Repugs hate their own TARP because it did basically work, meaning their "all govt is bad" mantra is bull .

President McLiar and the Repugs would not have let AIG, WF, Citi, BoA, etc all go bankrupt anyway, wiping out wealthy stock and bond holders in those corps.

[TeyshaBlue]

omfg

[coyotes_geek]

TARP basically worked, no matter who started it.

Repugs hate their own TARP because it did basically work, meaning their "all govt is bad" mantra is bull .

President McLiar and the Repugs would not have let AIG, WF, Citi, BoA, etc all go bankrupt anyway, wiping out wealthy stock and bond holders in those corps.

So Obama is a liar and the Republicans saved the economy with their successful TARP program.

[boutons_deux]

what is Hussein lying about.

The Congressional Repugs hate TARP as a govt intervention, no matter what the results, and trash TARP to rouse their rabble against govt.

[Th'Pusher]

To the list of things that everyone knows is true … except for they’re not, add this one: President Obama’s been a big, huge, spender. His profligate spending, as Gov Romney puts it, created a "prairie fire of debt."

In fact, President Obama's spending record is the lowest of any president since Eisenhower, according to a recent analysis by the journalist Rex Nutting for the website Marke ch (MW).

I’m sure that sounds surprising, and it has led to some reanalysis of Nutting’s work, which I’ll review in a moment. His critics made one reasonable correction (and some unreasonable ones), but either way, the qualitative result is the same: Obama is low spender; in fact, when I make some adjustments that I think make sense, real spending has actually declined under his presidency (see here).

It goes without saying that conservatives are throwing a fit over this result, since it undermines two of their favorite talking points: 1) Obama spends like a drunken sailor, and 2) to fix America, end this runaway spending.

But there is no runaway spending.

Marke ch does not do somersaults to get these results. Nutting took the published budget numbers and for this comparison used methods that are standard among budget analysts, coming up with a rate of spending increase, between 2009 and 2013, of 1.4 percent per year. Comparable rates include 8.7 percent for Reagan’s first term (say it ain’t so, Ronny!), 5.4 percent for Bush I, 3.2 percent for Clinton’s first term, and 7.3 percent for Bush II’s first term.

Since a president inherits his predecessor’s budget – his own first one doesn’t take effect until his second year in office – the standard method here is to consider their first year in office as the base year. In Obama’s case, that’s 2009. Now, that year’s spending was inflated by a lot of stuff related to the Great Recession and financial rescue, so it’s a high base, but it’s still the legitimate starting point. And MW tries to be fair by assigning the 2009 stimulus spending and some other appropriations from that year to Obama’s record.

The Washington Post Fact Checker made two other adjustments, one of which I think is legit. First, he re-assigned some of the 2009 Troubled Asset Relief Program (aka TARP, aka the bank bailout) spending to Obama, a peculiar choice given that this was clearly a Bush program. But OK … it is true that the 2009 TARP estimate turned out to be too high (giving President Obama a high spending perch to come down from) and later budgets’ adjustments to the TARP took the spending down as estimates began to reflect far fewer bank losses than expected (though this doesn’t effect that endpoint comparisons of 2009 and 2013 made by MW).

This is also very cherry-picky of the Post … they didn’t go through and adjust other presidents' base years for other anomalies, of which there are many (recessions, wars, etc.). On the other hand, the WaPo is correct that MW’s endpoint in 2013 is biased down, since MW uses the CBO "current law" outlays for that year instead of CBO’s score of the president’s actual budget request. When you plug that in, instead of MW’s 1.4 percent spending growth per year, you get 2.4 percent.

But here’s the clincher. Do it the WaPo way, including the (bogus) assignment of 2009 TARP addition to Obama, do it my way (with the correct 2013 endpoint), or do it MW’s way, you still get essentially the same result: spending under Obama increased more slowly than under any president since the 1950s.

This isn’t just academic, nor is it simply a matter of blowing away some Republican talking points. The view that spending is out of control under the President is a key theme of the Tea Party, and it thus played a central role during the 2010 midterm elections. And in no small part, those results heralded an era of political dysfunction that continues to generate steep human costs.

This erroneous spending meme and the politics it engenders has thus far crushed any chance of additional job measures, leaving us slogging along at levels of unemployment that should be unacceptable. Moreover, this state of affairs is even more unconscionable when you consider that the cost to the government of borrowing right now is lower than it has been in 60 years.

One day, facts will again matter. The sooner that day comes, the better.



Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...#ixzz1wVg8MUZY

[boutons_deux]

"This erroneous spending meme"

meme? IT'S A LIE

[Wild Cobra]

My God people. Look it up yourself:

OMB Table 1.1

If I take on and off budget for Bush's 8 years, there is an average annual deficit of $443,317 million. Obama for his two reconciled years averages a $1,296,542 million per year deficit. If I use the on budget numbers only, they are $610,698 million and $1,368,636 million.

[boutons_deux]

USA has a Banksters' Great Depression REVENUE problem, NOT a spending problem. The REVENUE problem is Repug/VRWC POLICY results of phony wars and gigantic tax cuts and financial deregulation (and tax avoidance/evasion by the 1%).

Cutting spending is an multi-decade, announced Repug/VRWC strategy of reducing govt size until it can be drowned in a bathtub.