The far right in the U.S. has been desperately trying to convince the electorate that President Obama is spending the U.S. into oblivion and driving up the debt.
Here are the facts…
The Washington Post and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities compiled this chart:
This chart shows the debt directly attributed to President Bush and President Obama. Much of the recent debt came from the Bush tax cuts.
Let’s look into the debt further…
This blog post states the following:
During 20 years of the presidencies of Reagan, Bush I and Bush II, the federal debt as a share of GDP increased by a cumulative 43% of GDP. During the 4 first years of the Obama presidency, it has increased by 36% of GDP.
This is how the Presidents rank in terms of development of the Debt/GDP ratio per year of tenure:
1. Clinton -1% per year
2. Reagan, Bush II: +2% per year
3. Bush I: +3% per year
4. Obama: +9% per year.
This following data comes from this (xls) Office of Management and Budget (OMB) source:
I re-plotted the data since, you could say, I have trust issues on the internet. It is similar to the data in the post.
The following is “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2012 to 2022″ from the Congressional Budget Office.
What the blog post above did not state is that the historical years since the Bush tax cuts and the recession that started prior to President Obama taking office, have been the major contributors to the rise in spending as a percentage of GDP. Also, the future years the OMB graph shows is a worst case scenario that includes the CBO Alternative Fiscal Scenario which assumes the Bush tax cuts are extended. President Obama did not create the recession, he inherited it. The Bush tax cuts were not enacted into law by President Obama. It is a lie to blame the recession and the Bush tax cuts on President Obama.
Let’s dig down a little more.
This following is historical and projected outlays from The Office and Management Budget by agency. Outlays are the total amount of money spent including authority from prior years that obligates outlays in the current year. The source data from the following charts comes from this (xls) OMB data. The data lines and the legend descriptions are in the same order. My graphics file can be downloaded here (xls). This chart shows that the Federal debt has accumulated from previous years going back to 1962.
OUTLAYS BY AGENCY: 1962–2017
(in millions of dollars)
This chart shows that the Federal debt has accumulated from previous years going back to 2000.
OUTLAYS BY AGENCY: 2000–2017
(in millions of dollars)
There is no huge increase in spending starting in 2009 when President Obama was inaugurated. The estimates include the Affordable Care Act. The chart shows that all the major increases in spending started ramping up more quickly in the decade of 2000. The spending is chiefly in the Department of Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration (off-budget), Department of Treasury and the Department of Defense (Military Programs). The Department of Health and Human Services increase comes chiefly from the middle class falling closer towards the federal poverty level as discussed below in more detail. The Social Security Administration increases have to do with baby boomers getting older and rising health care costs. The Treasury Department increases come basically from paying interest on the national debt by financing it with government bonds. The Department of Defense increases have to do with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the costs of gearing up for war. It is interesting to note that the U.S. spends 41% of the world’s total military expenditure. China, the next highest in the world’s total military expenditure, only spends 8.2% (see this).
The baseline scenario in the graph below shows current law and the effect of continuing certain programs that are scheduled to expire.
If you really want to raise the debt go ahead and repeal the Affordable Care Act according to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS) according to this publication:
Mandatory budget items are not optional year to year. It takes an act of Congress to change a mandated budget item. These requirements were made by Republicans and Democrats over the years. President Obama did not create the vast majority of mandatory budget requirements. The Affordable Care Act is mandatory but as already shown will lower the debt unless it is repealed. Discretionary budget items are voted on each year by Congress in 13 appropriations bills. Here is a chart showing mandatory and discretionary spending for 2010:
Mandatory and discretionary budget items are further explained in this:
Discretionary spending is provided in, and controlled by, annual appropriations acts, which fund many of the routine activities commonly associated with such federal government functions as running executive branch agencies, congressional offices and agencies, and international operations of the government.1 Essentially all spending on federal wages and salaries is discretionary.
Discretionary spending is often contrasted with mandatory, or direct, spending. Mandatory spending includes federal spending on entitlement programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as the Food Stamps program), and other spending controlled by laws other than appropriation acts.3 Spending levels for mandatory programs are generally controlled by eligibility criteria and size of the eligible population.
Mandatory budget items have gone up for some time now as this chart shows:
The recession which certainly preceded President Obama has resulted in many more people qualifying for entitlement benefits. President Obama did not change qualification requirements for these programs. As more people fell towards the federal poverty level, more people have received government benefits. This is shown by the Census Bureau and an article in the Wall Street Journal:
All of this data supports the conclusion that President Obama has acted very responsibly in view of the economic catastrophe he inherited. The far right is spinning yet another myth.
Links for further reading:
http://useconomy.about.com/od/fiscalpolicy/p/Mandatory.htm
http://useconomy.about.com/od/fiscalpolicy/tp/US_Federal_Budget.htm
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historicals/
http://useconomy.about.com/od/healthcarereform/f/Patient-Affordable-Care-Act.htm
http://useconomy.about.com/od/candidatesandtheeconomy/f/Healthcare_Reform_and_Budget.htm
http://super-economy.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/obama-hockey-stick.html
http://super-economy.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/american-federal-debt.html
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/21203
http://www.cbpp.org/research/index.cfm?fa=topic&id=121
http://www.gao.gov/special.pubs/longterm/pdfs/spring2012_update_slides.pdf
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10871/01-26-outlook.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/newsgraphics/2011/0119-budget/index.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2012/assets/health.pdf
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3450
http://www.cbp.org/documents/120224_CalWORKs_KeyFacts.pdf
http://www.kff.org/medicaid/upload/7985.pdf
http://www.ssa.gov/history/BudgetTreatment.html
http://www.epi.org/publication/bp156/
http://www.socialsecurity.gov/history/InternetMyths.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/us/politics/13health.html
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2012USbn_13bs1n_3031#usgs302
http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending
According to Factcheck.org, the U.S. debt rose $4.7 trillion during Obama’s first 3 years, an increase of 45 percent (source).
Washington Post has long been shown to have misrepresented the whole Bush vs Obama debt debate.
If you look at the attached article to the chart, you will see that Ezra Klein reports 4.7 trillion dollars:
“When Obama took office, the national debt was about $10.5 trillion. Today, it’s about $15.2 trillion. Simple subtraction gets you the answer preferred by most of Obama’s opponents: $4.7 trillion.”
The chart was not done by the Washington Post; it was done by The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
I will also quote a large section of Klein’s article here:
“But ask yourself: Which of Obama’s policies added $4.7 trillion to the debt? The stimulus? That was just a bit more than $800 billion. TARP? That passed under George W. Bush, and most of it has been repaid.
There is a way to tally the effects Obama has had on the deficit. Look at every piece of legislation he has signed into law. Every time Congress passes a bill, either the Congressional Budget Office or the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the effect it will have on the budget over the next 10 years. And then they continue to estimate changes to those bills. If you know how to read their numbers, you can come up with an estimate that zeros in on the laws Obama has had a hand in.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities was kind enough to help me come up with a comprehensive estimate of Obama’s effect on the deficit. As it explained to me, it’s harder than it sounds.
Obama, for instance, is clearly responsible for the stimulus. The health-care law, too.
When Obama entered office, the Bush tax cuts were already in place and two wars were ongoing. Is it fair to blame Obama for war costs four months after he was inaugurated, or tax collections 10 days after he took office?
So the center built a baseline that includes everything that predated Obama and everything we knew about the path of the economy and the actual trajectory of spending through August 2011. Deviations from the baseline represent decisions made by the Obama administration. Then we measured the projected cost of Obama’s policies.
In two instances, this made Obama’s policies look more costly. First, both Democrats and Republicans tend to think the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts is a quirky budget technicality, and their full extension should be assumed. In that case, voting for their extension looks costless, and they cannot be blamed for the resulting increase in deficits. I consider that a dodge, and so I added Obama’s decision to extend the Bush tax cuts for two years — at a total cost of $620 billion — to his total. If Obama follows through on his promise to extend all the cuts for income under $250,000 in 2013, it will add trillions more to the deficit.”
Additionally, I will quote a substantial portion of the FactCheck link you cited:
“In fact, the upward trend began with Ronald Reagan’s fiscal 1982 budget, declined somewhat from fiscal 1997 through 2001, and resumed the upward climb with George W. Bush’s first budget in fiscal 2002 (which started Oct. 1, 2001).
And the rise accelerated as the economy slid into the worst recession since the Great Depression, starting in December 2007. As the economy shrank, the debt-to-GDP ratio jumped 5 percentage points in the fiscal year that started Oct. 1, 2007, and another 14.8 percentage points during the following year. Obama took office nearly one-third of the way into that 12-month period. At the time, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was projecting the deficit for that fiscal year would be $1.2 trillion. It later rose to $1.4 trillion after enactment of Obama’s economic stimulus package, to be followed by back-to-back deficits of nearly $1.3 trillion in fiscal 2010 and $1.3 trillion again in fiscal 2011. CBO just projected the deficit for the current fiscal year, ending Sept. 30, will be $1.1 trillion.
A caution: The chart we’ve shown here is for total debt, including money the government owes to itself, chiefly through the Social Security trust funds. But a chart tracking only the debt owed to the public would show a similar shape. CBO projects that the debt owed to the public was nearly 68 percent of GDP in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, and will reach 73 percent this year and exceed 75 percent at the end of fiscal 2013.
We won’t attempt here to assess which side is more to blame for the mounting debt, or how much of the increase is Obama’s fault. Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein argues that the economic stimulus and other Obama policies account for just under $1 trillion of the debt added since he took office, while Bush added $5.1 trillion in his eight years — mostly due to tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the other hand, former Washington Post reporter Eric Pianin and others fault Obama for not getting more strongly behind the recommendations of his own deficit-reduction commission more than a year ago. Obama agreed to extend Bush’s tax cuts for two years, even as his commission called for tax reform. And he attacked Republican proposals to hold down the cost of Medicare, despite the commission’s call to move beyond the “phantom savings” in his own health care law, savings the commission said “will never materialize.””
So, the answer is both articles are correct. Here is what I think should be the lessons:
1. If the source (i.e., Washington Post) is incorrect we should show exactly how it is incorrect and detail where it went wrong. To just say it is wrong and not explain why leaves the matter up to faith (i.e., whatever one’s ideology predisposes one to believe). I think there are objective facts that can prove the reality of the situation (either, neither or some of both ways). In any case, we do not have to leave it up to ideology.
2. To imply that President Obama made 4.7 trillion dollars worth of bills is misleading at best and I prefer to say a “lie” of the right. True there was 4.7 trillion dollars added to the debt after Obama took office. However, it is hardly fair to blame Obama for all the mandatory spending that he did not originate or much of the discretionary spending. In 2010 mandatory spending was 55% of the budget and defense discretionary was 20%. This amounts to 75% of the 2010 budget. 6% was interest on the debt. The remaining 19% was all the rest of the discretionary spending. If you look at Figure 5 of the CBO report I cited in the essay (http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/10-26-DiscretionarySpending_Testimony.pdf) on page 22 of the pdf you will see that defense discretionary has been going down since the Bush years due to Obama’s budget and the Budget Control Act that President Obama signed into law on August 2, 2011 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_Control_Act). This was also the bill that created the “super committee” which will have further dramatic effects on the budget going ahead if we go over the “fiscal cliff”. If you state that President Obama increased the debt 4.7 trillion dollars then I think it is also your responsibility to state exactly how he, personally, added 4.7 trillion to the debt. Otherwise, you are only repeating political propaganda that only reinforces dogma and does nothing the gives folks the facts they need to think critically.
3. Even according to the FactCheck link the “debt-to-GDP ratio jumped 5 percentage points in the fiscal year that started Oct. 1, 2007, and another 14.8 percentage points during the following year”. The recession pushed more folks towards the federal poverty limit which put more people on entitlement. However, the middle class had been sliding that way for some time before Obama, they just went down faster after the recession. The CBO and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) also agree on the benefit of the Affordable Care Act as opposed to doing nothing or repealing. Additionally, the CBO historical budget sources I cited do not show a 45% increase in spending starting in 2009. This is misleading. It actually shows a decrease in spending in 2009 and again in 2012. Take a look at the total outlays from 2008 to 2009 when Bush was still in office. That sharp increase during the last year of the Bush administration was dramatically changed by Obama or we would have been looking at almost a straight line increase. I made all these points in the article and they still stand unless you have details that would counter the CBO, GAO, OMB and CMS.
In general, I think that Republicans have proved over the last few years of the Obama administration that they would rather make the debt worse than compromise with the Democrats. We could have had “President Obama’s full plan to slash upwards of $3 trillion from federal budget deficits over 10 years” (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-spending-cuts-spread-pain/story?id=14560170). This is how we could have reduced the debt dramatically. I have also written about how we should have started from the Simpson-Bowles plan (http://mixermuse.com/blog/2012/06/25/simpson-bowles-revisted/). I think the days of bipartisan compromise are over and I think, no matter who gets elected, we may have to govern by ultimatum, the fiscal cliff and letting the Bush tax cuts expire. This will be very ugly and the ones yelling the loudest about spending and debt will be squealing the most when it hits. IMO, this is not the politicians fault, it is the voter’s fault – they are getting exactly what they deserve and voted for.
We could go back and forth for a very long time on this, but I don’t have the time. You’ve provided such a huge amount of information, it would take way too long. I’ll just say this…
I agree totally with you that the Republicans have shown themselves to be fiscally irresponsible. Whether they are more or less irresponsible than the Democrats, or whether Bush more than Obama, doesn’t really matter, and would be a subject of great dispute given the amount of data available to say what one wants to say with it. They are all pretty irresponsible.
understood…I totally understand the time crunch on responding so never a problem…I also agree there is enough blame to go around with the politicians but I really do lay the majority of the blame at the electorate’s feet…garbage in, garbage out as we say in software
The electorate, yes. But how do we achieve an informed electorate in the tsunami of information (and dysinformation)available? I think finding some big ticket, fundamental issues, and letting the rest go, is one way to approach this (for busy people). The values being shown right now on tax policy and regulation are enough for me (food borne illness increasing because of understaffed regulatory agency just one example of what’s in store if we decimate government; it’s exactly what many corporations want…kill the sheriff, there’s too much accountability going on here). Etc.
I think education is the massive question and the time factor, the time to think critically, is a serious limitation of the education option. However, IMO if education is NOT a necessary condition of democracy then Aristotle’s critique of democracy as prone to manipulation by the tyrant (or equivalent ‘market’ tyrannies) leaves us with either the idealism of the philosopher King or a state controlled tyranny. While I understand contemporary criticisms of Enlightenment, I think we are really up against a wall and MUST find a way validate education and the time it takes to think critically.
I just don’t buy the fingerpointing going on by Obama towards the Republicans right now and I’ll tell you why.
- Obama could have dealt with this debt crunch for an entire year before he started to pay attention to it but he deferred doing anything about it until after the elections last Nov. In other words he decided to ignore the problem for a year and is now blaming Republicans for not fixing this long known problem fast enough. That’s pretty hypocritical of him.
A little hypocritical what kind of idiot are you do you get the part almost 5 trillion spent before Obama stepped in the front door…….keep voting republican losers are all the same…….
Hi ruserious, welcome to Critical Thinking Applied. If you read our About page, you would know that this blog is all about the need for civility and critical thinking in political discourse. And also that civility and critical thinking are correlated. The fact that you call someone an idiot, hypocritical, and losers, without substantiating those claims, makes you very uncivil and strongly suggests that you are not engaged in critical thinking.