President Obama: The Biggest Government
Spender In World History


http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2012/06/14/president-obama-the-biggest-government-spender-in-world-history/






























The
U.S. has never before had a President who thinks so little of the
American people that he imagines he can win re-election running on the
opposite of reality. But that is the reality of President Obama today.
Waving a planted press commentary, Obama recently claimed on the
campaign stump, “federal spending since I took office has risen at the
slowest pace of any President in almost 60 years.”
Peggy Noonan aptly summarized in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal the take away by the still holding majority of Americans living in the real world:



“There is, now, a house-of-cards feel about this administration. It
became apparent some weeks ago when the President talked on the stump –
where else? – about an essay by a fellow who said spending growth
[under Obama] is actually lower than that of previous Presidents. This
was startling to a lot of people, who looked into it and found the man
had left out most spending from 2009, the first year of Mr. Obama’s
Presidency. People sneered: The President was deliberately using a
misleading argument to paint a false picture! But you know, why would
he go out there waiving an article that could immediately be
debunked? Maybe because he thought it was true. That’s more
alarming, isn’t it, the idea that he knows so little about the effects
of his own economic program that he thinks he really is a low spender.”

What this shows most importantly is that the recognition is starting
to break through to the general public regarding the President’s
rhetorical strategy that I’ve have been calling Calculated Deception.
The latter is deliberately using a misleading argument to paint a false
picture. That has been a central Obama practice not only throughout his
entire presidency, but also as the foundation of his 2008 campaign
strategy, and actually throughout his whole career.
Rest assured, Ms. Noonan, that the President is not as nuts as he may
seem at times. He knows very well that he is not a careful
spender. His whole mission is to transform the U.S. not into a Big
Government country, but a Huge Government country, because only a
country run by a Huge Government can be satisfactorily controlled by
superior, all wise and beneficent individuals like himself. That is why
he is at minimum a Swedish socialist, if not worse. Notice, though,
how far behind the times he and his weak minded supporters are, as even
the Swedes have abandoned Swedish socialism as a failure.
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!


Actually, President Obama and the Democrats were even more deeply
involved in the fiscal 2009 spending explosion than that. As Bader also
reports, “The Democrat Congress [in 2008], confident Obama was going to
win in 2008, passed only three of fiscal 2009’s 12 appropriations bills
(Defense, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security). The
Democrat Congress passed the rest of them [in 2009], and [President]
Obama signed them.” So Obama played a very direct role in the runaway
fiscal 2009 spending explosion.
Note as well that President Reagan didn’t just go along with the wild
spending binge of the previous Democratic Congress for fiscal year 1981
when he came into office on January 20 of that year. Almost no one
remembers now the much vilified at the time 1981 Reagan budget cuts, his
first major legislative initiative. Then Democrat Rep. Phil Gramm
joined with Ohio Republican Del Latta to push through the Democratic
House $31 billion in Reagan proposed budget cuts to the fiscal year 1981 budget,
which totaled $681 billion, resulting in a cut of nearly 5% in that
budget. Obama could have done the exact same thing when he entered
office in January, 2009, even more so with the Congress totally
controlled by his own party at the time.
Reagan then ramped up the spending cuts from there. In nominal
terms, non-defense discretionary spending actually declined by 7.1% from
1981 to 1982. But roaring inflation at the time actually masks the
true magnitude of the Reagan spending cut achievement. In constant
dollars, non-defense discretionary spending declined by 14.4% from 1981
to 1982, and by 16.8% from 1981 to 1983. Moreover, in constant dollars, this non-defense discretionary spending never returned to its 1981 level for the rest of Reagan’s two terms! By 1988, this spending was still down 14.4% from its 1981 level in constant dollars.