I recently read an article that stated federal spending was lower under Obama's presidency when compared to Bush's. I found that odd so I did some digging.
The author is talking about the rate of the economy with reference to GDP. That's a way to get a picture of the debt issue. The problem is that the president doesn't have as much control over GDP as he does over spending. I prefer looking at spending in terms of real purchasing power. In other words looking at deficit spending by looking at the total debt accumulated by year adjusted for inflation. This more accurately shows the spending habits of the federal government.
So that's what I did. I used as unbiased numbers as I could. Inflation rates I found from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I used total debt numbers from Treasury Direct. This data unfortunately doesn't have FY 2011 or current FY 2012. So I used an ABC article for FY 2011 and using CBO projections (From January which have since been revised and probably will be revised again), for FY 2012.
That said here is what I found. (Add 2000 years to the x-axis for actual years)
Then I ran the numbers for the average deficit per year. I used 4 years for Obama since I included the projections for FY 2012 and 8 years for Bush. Again all these numbers are adjusted for today's dollars.
So when the author of the above article claims that spending 248% more on average than the baseline is a reduction in spending I can't help but think that context is being twisted to paint a rosy picture.
