Boom, and an hour after I say that, I read this is a New Yorker column:
2. The rise in federal spending under Obama was pretty modest. If you listened to the Republicans, you would think he had massively expanded the size of the U.S. government. That simply isn’t true—a point that can be illustrated in several ways.
One is to look at the path of federal spending as recorded by the Office of Management and Budget. In fiscal 2008, total federal outlays came to $2.7 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars. In 2012, according to the O.M.B., they will be $3.2 trillion. That is a rise of about 18.5 per cent over four years, an annual increase of about 4.3 per cent. How does that rate of growth stack up with the record of previous Presidents? Well, it means Obama has expanded federal spending a bit faster than President Clinton. But Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both increased spending at considerably higher rates. (Thanks to Rex Nutting, a columnist at MarketWatch, for drawing my attention to the historic data.)
So the figures show Obama wasn’t much of a spendthrift. And he wasn’t even responsible for most of the increase in federal spending that happened on his watch: it came in the form of higher outlays for mandatory programs, such as Social Security, other entitlements, and interest on the national debt. Over the past four years, discretionary spending—the bit of the federal budget that policymakers can control—has increased by just $106 billion, or a little more than ten per cent. That’s an annual rate of increase of about 2.4 per cent.
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