If You Want Another Debt And Spending Binge, Vote GOP, Ctd

The AP now weighs in, ultimately relying on McCain economics adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin as a neutral arbiter. But it's another helpful run-through of the numbers. The first question, as I noted in my first post on the subject, is how to apportion the 2009 fiscal budget. The second is how to treat TARP. If you assign much of TARP and the 2009 budget to Bush, the subsequent rate of growth of spending does indeed look remarkably tight-fisted. Equally, assigning all of that to Obama, when he took office well into the fiscal year, alters things dramatically. Yes, he signed funding bills in 2009, but the cake was well-baked by then. But the AP assigns "much" of the spending in 2009, including the stabilizers, to Obama alone. They also refuse to give Obama any credit for the payback of TARP in 2010 or the decline in support for Freddie and Fannie.

The AP takes the hardest position on Obama and comes up with the following bottom line:

All told, government spending now appears to be growing at an annual rate of roughly 3 percent over the 2010-2013 period, rather than the 0.4 percent claimed by Obama and the MarketWatch analysis.

I think that's excessively tilted against the president. But even so, lets accept it for the sake of argument. A 3 percent annualized increase in federal spending would still put Obama in first place for spending restraint since LBJ - which is staggering given the scale of the economic collapse he inherited. A quick comparison? Bush's first term - with no global great recession - saw spending grow an annualized 7.3 percent. Reagan's first term? 8.7 percent.

And again, remember the Romney claim that started this all off: that "since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history."

Even when you put the maximal blame on Obama for spending in the last three years, including all the automatic spending that came with the collapse of 2008, that's still untrue. And it's odd that the GOP insists it isn't. Shouldn't they be claiming some credit for restraining spending from 2010 onwards?

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