Dan Mitchell does some statistical legerdemain to calculate US government spending increases by presidential terms in office and discovers some surprising results:
I’ve learned that it’s more important to pay attention to hard numbers rather than political rhetoric. Republicans, for instance, love to beat their chests about spending restraint, but I never believe them without first checking the numbers. Likewise, Democrats have a reputation as big spenders, but we occasionally get some surprising results when they’re in charge.
President Obama was especially hard to categorize. Republicans automatically assume he was profligate because he started his tenure with a Keynesian spending binge and the Obamacare entitlement. But after a few years in office, some were arguing he was the most frugal president of modern times.
- So I crunched the data in 2012 and discovered that he was either a big spender or a closet Reaganite depending on how the numbers were sliced.
- I then re-calculated the budget numbers in 2013 and found that spending grew at a slower rate the longer Obama was in office.
- And when I did the same exercise in 2014, using another year of data, Obama looked even more like a tight-fisted fiscal conservative.
Or, to be more accurate, what I basically discovered is that debt limit fights, sequestration, and government shutdowns were actually very effective. Indeed, the United States enjoyed a de facto spending freeze between 2009 and 2014, leading to the biggest five-year reduction in the burden of federal spending since the end of World War II. And it’s unclear that Obama deserves any of the credit since he was on the wrong side of those battles.
Anyhow, I’ve decided to update the numbers now that we have 8 years of data for Obama’s two terms.
But first, a brief digression on methodology: All the numbers you’re about to see have been adjusted for inflation, so these are apples-to-apples comparisons. Moreover, all my calculations are designed to show average annual increases. I also made sure that the “stimulus” spending that took place in the 2009 fiscal year was included in Obama’s totals, even though that fiscal year began (on October 1, 2008) while Bush was President.
Lots of links in the original post that I’m too lazy to re-link, so go read the whole thing. H/T to Rafe Champion for the link.
