--Guido the Pimp to Joel Goodson (Tom Cruise) in "Risky Business"
PolitiFact Bias’ Bryan White had a Facebook comment "put-down-fest" on a PolitiFact ruling related to a recent article (by Rex Nutting of MarketWatch) which has set liberal circles abuzz while enraging the right with numerous re-checks of federal spending numbers concluding that “Obama’s spending binge never happened.” And it looks like there’s a potential conflict in rulings between the Washington Post’s Fact Checker and PolitiFact. He declared on a cross-post with his other anti-PolitiFact blog:
Criticisms of Nutting make clear that the accounting of bailout loans substantially skews the numbers in Obama's favor. Using the AP's estimates of 9.7 percent for 2009 (substantially attributable to Obama) and 7.8 percent in 2010, Obama's record while working with a cooperative Democrat-controlled Congress looks like it would challenge the high spending of any of his recent predecessors. The leader from the Facebook graphic, President Reagan, tops out at 8.7 percent without any adjustment for inflation. PolitiFact's fact check was utterly superficial and did not properly address the issue…
There is a silver lining. The Obama administration has so aggressively seized on this issue that PolitiFact will certainly feel pressure to fact check different permutations of Nutting's claims.
I can't wait to see the contortions as PolitiFact tries to reconcile this rating with subsequent attempts.
PolitiFact’s finding of Mostly True was to a Facebook post that “Mitt Romney is wrong to claim that spending under Obama has 'accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history' ” while WaPo’s Glenn Kessler looked into Nutting’s piece as referred to by WhiteHouse spokesperson Jay Carney (and his statement that journalists not checking items like this out are “ slothful and lazy”). While I don’t see much difference between the two, it could be claimed (as PolitiFact did) they were only checking the correctness of Nutting’s figures, while Kessler was examining the methodology itself, along with his disclaimer that “numbers can be easily manipulated.” Which indeed they can, as others came out with their own manipulations, which put Obama all over the place.
Writer White is obviously trying to place the emphasis on Obama spending and portray it in the worst possible light, because it’s an excellent (as he would put it) “red herring.” He’s well aware that it distracts from the real issue of the deficits.
I have to admit that the Washington Post article made some good points: Obama certainly looks like he spent more, although it’s leveled off beyond the Stimulus and as the TARP accounting winded down. Instead of an up-the-down mountain, it looks more like a plateau—expenditures took a steep turn up when the economy crashed in 2008-9 and then flattened, but stayed right up there, never coming down.
But my concern is the BIG PICTURE: is there something only Obama did that caused the rise in spending? Or, to be “charitable” to George Bush, and to quote a National Review article of a similar theme: What changed about Bush policies that made them so much more expensive once Barack Obama took office? Republicans could say that, until they won the congressional majority in 2010, that it’s a Democrat spending binge; but it appears the plateau is continuing into 2011. Even their mid-2011 demands about the debt ceiling did very little to stop it.
We know it’s not “Obamacare” because it hasn’t really kicked in yet. A look at spending charts from that bastion of conservatism Heritage.Org provide some interesting information. It has this basic chart and another great list below it under the title “where has all the money been going?” (It actually has A LOT of good charts as one scrolls down the page.)
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| Obama adm. between vertical lines: net interest, anti-poverty and SS/Medicare increased. |
We had the major non-discretionary components of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid long, long before Obama came into office. The National Review lists certain programs (such as infrastructure funds) as if they are singular events, even though the Heritage charts show they have been an ongoing expense. But is there anything to show exactly what Obama is spending crazily on? He continued spending on the two wars started under Bush. He left the Medicare Part D benefit in place, started in 2006 without “PayGo” by the Republican Congress. He increased Veterans Benefits because of winding down Bush’s two wars,and domestic programs because of the ongoing recession. He did promote the passing of unemployment compensation extensions, which show large increases, but don’t make up a significant part of the budget. He requested increases in existing programs and some were denied by the congress. We also know that interest expense on the existing debt and new debt incurred has increased a great deal. But aside from the Stimulus, which was half tax cuts, he had no new program of profligate spending. In other words, with all other things being equal, this is likely to have been the same scenario under President John McCain.
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| Click to enlarge: Even moving all TARP and "negative spending" to Obama's column doesn't curtail Bush's spending. |
As I hate to present current “Whitehouse” charts because they are probably likely embellished to favor Obama, the above chart (that's similar to a Whitehouse chart) from the New York Times shows that it’s not a “spending” problem inasmuch as it’s a deficit problem, a topic Republicans for good reason like to avoid, as noted with White. As noted by them:
A few lessons can be drawn from the numbers. First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect. If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels. Second, a healthy budget requires a healthy economy; recessions wreak havoc by reducing tax revenue. Government has to spur demand and create jobs in a deep downturn, even though doing so worsens the deficit in the short run. Third, spending cuts alone will not close the gap. The chronic revenue shortfalls from serial tax cuts are simply too deep to fill with spending cuts alone. Taxes have to go up.
In a previous post I discussed how the aging boomers are affecting the budgets. While White kept going on and on about how Nutting (and PolitiFact) ignored TARP negative spending in Facebook posts, nowhere did he say anything about the effect of boomers on the outlays of Social Security and Medicare (mentioned by PolitiFact). The first boomers turned age 62 in 2008, Obama’s election year, which made them eligible for social security. In 2011, the first boomers became eligible for Medicare. The number I’ve heard is it’s 10,000 boomer birthdays per day. That’s 300,000 more people per month—3.6 million people per year-- who can collect government entitlements.
So in conclusion, while “TARP re-payments” were only reflected as a credit to outlays of $110 billion in March, 2010, we have the following other items weighing heavily on outlays during the Obama administration:
1. The continuing wars (and the “Afghanistan surge”)
2. The “beginning” of the burgeoning Social Security/Medicare costs of retiring, aging boomers
3. The domestic spending associated with the continuing effects of the economic collapse in 2008 (especially unemployment compensation).
4. Interest on the debt (there was interest on about $10 trillion when Obama came into office and it’s pushing $15 trillion now)
As a follow up to his “debunking” of Obama frugality, Daniel Mitchell at Cato added what he called “sage advice” to the GOP, quoting conservative writer Jonah Goldberg:
Here’s a simple suggestion for Mitt Romney: Admit that the Democrats have a point. Right before the Memorial Day weekend, Washington was consumed by a debate over how much Barack Obama has spent as president, and it looks like it’s picking up again. …all of these numbers are a sideshow: Republicans in Washington helped create the problem, and Romney should concede the point. Focused on fighting a war, Bush — never a tightwad to begin with — handed the keys to the Treasury to Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert, and they spent enough money to burn a wet mule. On Bush’s watch, education spending more than doubled, the government enacted the biggest expansion in entitlements since the Great Society (Medicare Part D), and we created a vast new government agency (the Department of Homeland Security). …Nearly every problem with spending and debt associated with the Bush years was made far worse under Obama. The man campaigned as an outsider who was going to change course before we went over a fiscal cliff. Instead, when he got behind the wheel, as it were, he hit the gas instead of the brakes — and yet has the temerity to claim that all of the forward momentum is Bush’s fault. …Romney is under no obligation to defend the Republican performance during the Bush years. Indeed, if he’s serious about fixing what’s wrong with Washington, he has an obligation not to defend it. This is an argument that the Tea Party — which famously dealt Obama’s party a shellacking in 2010 — and independents alike are entirely open to. Voters don’t want a president to rein in runaway Democratic spending; they want one to rein in runaway Washington spending.
Goldberg exaggerates Obama’s “hitting the gas” of course; he knows Obama would be better characterized as a back seat driver who has no control over the gas pedal.
Keeping this in mind, recently Chris Matthews of Hardball made a predictive statement that I’ve thought about as well. He said he thought maybe it was better the Republicans win this election cycle. Sometimes I hope the Koch Gang and the Grover Norquist worshippers and the Tea Partiers get their wish—that the Republicans win big this Fall, with President Romney and a majority in the house and senate, and the Tea Partiers get to slash and burn all the programs they want. Because in order to truly accomplish any cuts of a substantive nature, and to pay down the deficits and not just balance the budget (and to make further tax cuts) they MUST cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, because all those departments President Romney wants to get rid of that Rick Perry can’t think of aren’t going to be enough, along with penny-ante stuff like defunding Planned Parenthood and NPR. Or, they can close big tax revenue loopholes such as the deduction for mortgage interest enjoyed by the middle class, effectively raising their taxes. And once they do, as Matthews said, they will be gone in two years (and Romney will become “Reversible Mittens” to cooperate with the Democrats). Because, as in my headline quote from Guido the Pimp in Risky Business, they’d be f**king with too many livelihoods in a sluggish economy.
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| Yep, I hope that the Tea Partiers get their wish. |
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