Wednesday, May 23, 2012
It's been breaking news all over MSNBC, liberal blogs,
newspapers and even The Wall Street Journal: "Federal spending under Obama
at historic lows ... It's clear that Obama has been the most fiscally moderate
president we've had in 60 years." There's even a chart!
I'll pause here to give you a moment to mop up the coffee
on your keyboard. Good? OK, moving on ...
This shocker led to around-the-clock smirk fests on MSNBC.
As with all bogus social science from the left, liberals hide the numbers and
proclaim: It's "science"! This is black and white, inarguable, and
why do Republicans refuse to believe facts?
Ed Schultz claimed the chart exposed "the big
myth" about Obama's spending: "This chart -- the truth -- very
clearly shows the truth undoubtedly." And the truth was, the "growth
in spending under President Obama is the slowest out of the last five
presidents."
Note that Schultz also said that the "part of the
chart representing President Obama's term includes a stimulus package,
too." As we shall see, that is a big, fat lie.
Schultz's guest, Reuters columnist David Cay Johnston
confirmed: "And clearly, Obama has been incredibly tight-fisted as a
president."
Everybody's keyboard OK?
On her show, Rachel Maddow proclaimed: "Factually
speaking, spending has leveled off under President Obama. Spending is not
skyrocketing under President Obama. Spending is flattening out under President
Obama."
In response, three writers from "The Daily
Show" said, "We'll never top that line," and quit.
Inasmuch as this is obviously preposterous, I checked
with John Lott, one of the nation's premier economists and author of the
magnificent new book with Grover Norquist: Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and
Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future.
(I'm reviewing it soon, but you should start without me.)
It turns out Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch
chart, i>attributes all spending during Obama's entire first year, up to
Oct. 1, to President Bush.
That's not a joke.
That means, for example, the $825 billion stimulus bill,
proposed, lobbied for, signed and spent by Obama, goes in ... Bush's column.
(And if we attribute all of Bush's spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
and No Child Left Behind to William Howard Taft, Bush didn't spend much
either.)
Nutting's "analysis" is so dishonest, even The
New York Times has ignored it. He includes only the $140 billion of stimulus
money spent after Oct. 1, 2009, as Obama's spending. And he's testy about that,
grudgingly admitting that Obama "is responsible (along with the Congress)
for about $140 billion in extra spending in the 2009 fiscal year from the
stimulus bill."
Nutting acts as if it's the height of magnanimity to
"attribute that $140 billion in stimulus to Obama and not to Bush
..."
On what possible theory would that be Bush's spending?
Hey -- we just found out that Obamacare's going to cost triple the estimate.
Let's blame it on Calvin Coolidge!
Nutting's "and not to Bush" line is just a
sleight of hand. He's hoping you won't notice that he said "$140
billion" and not "$825 billion," and will be fooled into
thinking that he's counting the entire stimulus bill as Obama's spending. (He
fooled Ed Schultz!)
The theory is that a new president is stuck with the
budget of his predecessor, so the entire 2009 fiscal year should be attributed
to Bush.
But Obama didn't come in and live with the budget Bush
had approved. He immediately signed off on enormous spending programs that had
been specifically rejected by Bush. This included a $410 billion spending bill
that Bush had refused to sign before he left office. Obama signed it on March
10, 2009. Bush had been chopping brush in Texas for two months at that point.
Marketwatch's Nutting says that's Bush's spending.
Obama also spent the second half of the Troubled Asset
Relief Fund (TARP). These were discretionary funds meant to prevent a market
meltdown after Lehman Brothers collapsed. By the end of 2008, it was clear the
panic had passed, and Bush announced that he wouldn't need to spend the second
half of the TARP money.
But on Jan. 12, 2009, Obama asked Bush to release the
remaining TARP funds for Obama to spend as soon as he took office. By Oct. 1,
Obama had spent another $200 billion in TARP money. That, too, gets credited to
Bush, according to the creative accounting of Rex Nutting.
There are other spending bills that Obama signed in the
first quarter of his presidency, bills that would be considered massive under
any other president -- such as the $40 billion child health care bill, which
extended coverage to immigrants as well as millions of additional Americans.
These, too, are called Bush's spending.
Frustrated that he can't shift all of Obama's spending to
Bush, Nutting also lowballs the spending estimates during the later Obama
years. For example, although he claims to be using the White House's numbers,
the White House's estimate for 2012 spending is $3.795 trillion. Nutting
helpfully knocks that down to $3.63 trillion.
But all those errors pale in comparison to Nutting's
counting Obama's nine-month spending binge as Bush's spending.
If liberals will attribute Obama's trillion-dollar
stimulus bill to Bush, what won't they do?
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