One other note: even Paul Ryan’s budget would do NOTHING about the current increases in the Social Security and Medicare budgets. Since he claims that none of of his budget proposals will change the benefits of those already on Social Security and Medicare, or those who will soon be receiving those entitlements, you are going to see the EXACT SAME increases in spending occur if Romney/Ryan get elected in November.
That is, the spending will continue to escalate if Ryan is not prevaricating about his proposals for Social Security and Medicare.
My comment about the ‘new normal’ has to do with the claim that Obama has actually been a budget hawk. He’s only a budget hawk if you compare expenditures against a baseline of 2009. But 2009 represents an already-steep jump in government expenditures, so it’s a misleading number.
In 2008, Bush requested 2.9 trillion in expenditures. In 2009, he requested 3.1 trillion. The actual budget signed into law by a Democrat-controlled House, Senate, and White House was 500 billion dollars higher than that, and if Obama had had his way it would today be about 3.8 trillion dollars. That is a MASSIVE increase in spending over the last budget Bush submitted.
The Democrats have gone bananas over Paul Ryan’s ‘dishonesty’ because of a characterization of a plant shutdown that is complex and arguable, and apparently because he exaggerated a marathon time he ran 20 years ago. At the same time, they are trying to push an entire narrative about Obama being a fiscally prudent president by constructing a completely dishonest record about spending. They tried to declare 2009 all Bush’s responsibility, then use that as the baseline to use to evaluate Obama’s spending, even though the Democrats added 500 billion onto that budget before it was signed.
That’s where the dishonesty is. No one disputes that the government had additional welfare, food stamp, and UI costs due to the recession. But that’s not what the Democrats are arguing - they’re using dishonest numbers to paint Obama as some sort of fiscal hawk, when the reality is that he’s tried to spend more money than even his Democratically controlled Congress was comfortable with, and even the money that was spent represents a permanent $500 billion dollar per year increase over the last budget Bush proposed.
Bush’s 2009 budget, which was already in the middle of the recession when he requested it, called for a 4.9% increase in discretionary spending. Obama’s 2010 budget called for a 13.8% increase in discretionary spending, the Democratically-controlled congress added an other 180 billion dollars to the budget. Obama’s 2011 budget added another $113 billion dollars to that total.
And it’s not true that the increase is due to a jump in mandatory spending. That’s coming later. The 2011 budget has these summaries for mandatory spending:
Mandatory spending has actually decreased since ‘Bush’s last budget’.
Of course, if you go back to 2008 and compare, the picture looks quite a bit different. Some of it benefits Obama, some doesn’t. But the Democrats are the ones using 2009 as the first year of analysis.
What has gone up is interest on the debt, because the debt is now going up so fast. Obama is partly responsible for that. But interest rates are low right now, and Obama is a big beneficiary of that. In 2008, Bush had to pay $253 billion in debt service costs. The 2009 budget had those costs substantially reduced because of interest rate changes. But overall spending didn’t come down.
Another way that Obama and his supporters are being dishonest when using 2009 as the baseline is that TARP cost 151 billion in 2009, but earned the government 73 billion dollars in 2010 due to payback. So Bush gets dinged with the cost of the loan, and Obama is given credit when the loan is paid back. That’s a $224 billion dollar difference in one year, but it all got swallowed up by other increases.
That’s an ideological argument. We can have that debate, but the Democrats aren’t trying to claim that Obama borrowed and spent more because spending is a good thing right now - they’re trying to claim he’s actually a budget cutter. And that’s nonsense. He’s asked for more than he’s gotten every single year, and what he’s gotten is far more than what Bush ever requested.
No, but he’s responsible for pushing the stimulus, for increasing student loan support, for dramatically increasing food stamps and other social assistance programs like renter’s assistance, for increasing the size of the defense budget dramatically even as the war in Iraq was winding down, for dramatically increasing some agency budgets, and for over a trillion dollars in stimulus and various ‘jobs’ programs that didn’t work.
Yeah, it does. Even though Obama has been trying to blame anyone but himself for everything bad that’s happened during his presidency, Presidents don’t get a pass on their budgets. Bush didn’t get a pass for the extra spending that happened due to 9/11 or Katrina. He didn’t get a pass for being handed a recently-popped tech bubble that made his deficit record look worse than Clinton’s. He didn’t get a pass for the cost of the war in Afghanistan, even though Democrats agreed with it.
Obama knew what he was heading into. The recession was already at crisis levels when he campaigned to lower deficits. He took responsibility then, and even said that he should be fired if he didn’t get the problem solved in 4 years. Today’s Obama, and his Democrat supporters, spend their time trying to find anyone to blame, and trying to push off 500 billion dollars of spending in 2009 on a President who never asked for it and who had been out of office for 5 months when the budget was signed.
Of course, it’s hard to get a full picture of where all the money has gone, since Congress has not passed a budget in several years, in violation of federal law.
Why don’t you pick the year of Bush’s budget you’d like to compare to? I think fiscal year 2008 is the best basis for comparison, but please - be my guest and pick the year.
You’re getting some key details wrong here. When any President requests a budget, any mandatory spending is comprised of estimates plus (or minus) changes proposed to law. You cannot imply that Bush only requested “x” amount for mandatory spending because that x is only an estimate. If more people start claiming jobless benefits or Medicare because of a poor economy, it just means the estimate was wrong, not that the president proposed to limit or increase mandatory spending. So long as there are no changes to law, increases in Medicaid spending (for example) doesn’t mean that the President is somehow increasing spending on entitlements, it means that the cost of the government complying with benefits law has increased.
I’m not going to bother responding to the rest of this paragraph, because you made a fundamental error. Bush’s 2009 budget was proposed in February 2008. In what world do you live that February 2008 was “in the middle of the recession?”
Competely factually wrong. Mandatory spending in FY2008 was $1.847 trillion, 2012 mandatory spending is expected to cost $2.4 trillion. Are you looking at Wikipedia?
Are you making this up? Look at my cite. Between 2008 and this year, interest on the debt has gone from $451 billion to $450 billion. The cost of debt, even though the principal is growing, is very low due to low interest rates.
Sam, at several points you’ve said defenders of Obama are being disingenuous on some point or another. I do not think you’re being disingenuous at all, but you greatly overestimate your understanding of the US budget. You are one question deep on this complex matter. You clearly are good at googling things, but the way you lay out your arguments show that you don’t actually understand the different between budget authority and outlays, for example. That’s okay, it’s an esoteric subject.
But when you speak with authority on claims that Congress has violated the law by not passing a budget, you are using your lack of expertise to undercut your political attacks. There simply is no such requirement in law. And in any case, the Budget Control Act serves exactly the same purpose as a budget, except that it is law and a budget is not.
This ‘analysis’ assigns FY2009 wholly to Bush, uses that as the baseline, then compares it to 2010, 2011, and credits Obama with spending for 2012 and 2013 based on what was agreed to in 2011, which means nothing.
Here are their conclusions:
The article then uses that to declare that Obama is fiscally prudent. The White House picked that article up and started distributing it around. It was repeated as fact by most of the mainstream media outlets, and of course the left blogosphere and online magazines trumpeted it. Obama then repeated it on the campaign trail:
Now, not only is the source material a pack of lies, but Obama embellished it, claiming that ‘since he’d been president’ federal spending had increased at its lowest pace in 60 years. That’s not true even by Marketwatch’s goofy article, which ignored Obama changes to the FY2009 budget plus two years of spending based on CBO estimates that assume the ‘sequester’ will kick in and cut the budget automatically in 2013 - which everyone expects won’t happen.
This is a lie far bigger than the one told by Ryan at the convention, because it completely mischaracterizes an entire presidency.
Again: The 2009 budget wasn’t signed until April of 2009, long after Bush was gone. The Democrats intentionally delayed it so that they could cram in new spending that they knew Bush would veto. So Bush requested 3.1 trillion, and the budget passed at 3.52 trillion.
Now, Obama’s next budget went down to 3.46 trillion, a drop of 1.4% from the previous year, which is wholly credited to Obama. However, Bush’s budget had 260 billion dollars in it for TARP, which was supposed to be one-time spending. Take TARP out, and Bush was only asking for 2.84 trillion. That’s the real ‘baseline’ to measure from. And in FY2010, the government received 73 billion dollars in TARP repayments, which is credited against Obama’s expenditures. Had that money not been there, FY2010 would have come in 73 billion dollars higher.
Or we can ignore those shenanigans and just start the baseline from Bush’s 3.1 trillion dollar budget request, in which case Obama has presided over an increase of government from 3.1 trillion dollars to 3.8 trillion, which is the estimate for FY2013 from the President’s last budget proposal (summary tables here). And that’s another odd thing about the Marketwatch piece: It chooses to use the CBO’s estimate of the FY2013 budget, which I’m assuming must include the automatic cuts forced on the government by the House/Senate deal, and which will likely never happen. Instead, it should be looking at the President’s own budget which has its own estimates and presumably represents his wishes, which is what we’re evaluating here. That budget request is for 3.83 trillion dollars.
So, a fair way to look at it is to start at 3.1 trillion, Bush’s final request, and end with 3.83 trillion, Obama’s final request. Everything in between was done with Democrats in control. The biggest one-year increase was in FY2009 AFTER Obama was elected, and when Democrats had control of the entire government.
If you don’t believe that the difference between Bush’s 3.1 trillion request and the final 3.52 trillion dollar budget was Obama’s responsibility, read this:
So what happened is that Bush submitted a 3.1 trillion dollar budget. The Democrats sat on it, because they wanted a whole bunch of spending that they knew Bush would veto. So they ran the government on a ‘continuing resolution’ as they do now. Then in April they submitted it for President Obama’s signature, with 410 billion in new spending added on that Bush didn’t want. Obama signed it. He’s responsible for it. My numbers are based on moving that spending from Bush to Obama.
Thus, Obama is responsible for a 23.5% increase in government spending in his term - not a .4% increase.
A reminder: We’re not talking about revenues here or deficits - just an increase in spending. Whether taxes should or shouldn’t be raised has nothing to do with this.
Ravenman: I do in fact know how the budget works. What normally happens is that the President proposes the budget, then the House and Senate respond with their own versions. There’s a bunch of back and forth, and if they can’t come to agreement they sort it out in the reconciliation process. When they have a budget they all agree on they write a bunch of appropriations bills, which the President has to sign authorizing the spending. All of this is supposed to be completed before the start of the fiscal year.
In any event, FY2009 starts in October of 2008, so the FY2009 budget should have been fully authorized and the spending signed off by George Bush. If it had been, then I would agree that he bears full responsibility for it. But the Democrats didn’t want to have a budget fight in an election year because they wanted a lot more spending than Bush did. So they simply tabled his request and waited for Obama to be elected, knowing that he wouldn’t veto their budget request like Bush would have. Then they passed him a 410 billion dollar omnibus appropriations bill to sign, and that was charged as ‘spending belonging to Bush’ even though they delayed it precisely because they knew he would veto it.
To be fair, to get a complete picture of who is responsible for what we’d have to look at every appropriation Bush signed, and what was still left out. It’s possible he might have signed off on a smaller version of that appropriations bill, but we’ll never know.
By the way, TARP is charged to Bush, and repayments to TARP credited to Obama - but Obama voted in favor of Tarp when the spending came up for a vote. Count that as you will.
As for the difference between your numbers and mine - I generally use the summary tables from the online budget documents, and I linked to them. But they’re different for every year - even for past years, because they’re constantly being revised. I probably just used a different year than you did.
Sam, just stop it. You don’t even know the meaning of your own cites.
Congress never passed a $3.5 trillion budget in the spring of 2009. It did not happen. Congress passed a $410 billion appropriations bill, which was NOT additional spending. It was the cost of routine government operations that did not pass before Bush left office. This $410 billion was simply not spending in addition to what Bush had proposed.
You’re just totally and completely wrong. I still don’t think you’re being disingenuous, but you are well and truly showing that you don’t understand the first thing about this subject.
Let me review: Congress never, ever, never, ever passes a law to approve all $3.x trillion in spending that has occurred annually for the last several years. More than 2/3rds of the spending is mandatory, meaning that Congress does not approve it. The remaining trillion dollars or so is discretionary spending for routine government operations, which, if not approved by law, would force parts of the government to stop operations.
The Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 had $410 billion in spending in it, but it was not over and above what Bush had requested. Shortly before the 2008 elections, Congress passed appropriations bills for defense, veterans, and homeland security, then adjourned. All other routine government operations that are not entitlements were incrementally funded for another several months. The March 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act was the full year of funding for those non-defense agencies (Department of Justice, Department of Commerce, Department of Transportation, etc.) If Congress has not passed that appropriations bill, those agencies would have shut down. It was not $410 billion of “extra” or “additional” spending.
Please, stop it. No matter how much you have read on Wikipedia, you do not understand this subject very well at all.
If I read “A Brief History of Time,” I may have some familiarity with the concepts of cosmology. That does not mean I know how the universe works. You’ve made several egregious errors of fact in your last few posts, and even this part I’m responding to doesn’t seem to show a firm grasp of the budgeting process. You keep mixing up budget resolutions (which are passed by the House and Senate and do not have the force of law) with appropriations bills (which have nothing to do with the reconciliation process). You mix and match comparisons to budget authority and outlays, for example in previous posts in other threads you don’t seem to understand that presidential requests for new budget authority will never line up with deficit numbers for outlays.
If you have questions about the process, I’m happy to answer them. But your arguments in this thread are simply not credible due to glaring factual errors.
False. They waited to pass ADDITIONAL spending, because they knew Bush would veto it. This was not necessary spending, it was priorities Democrats wanted funded that Bush would not have allowed. So they waited until after the election.
The final $410 billion omnibus budget wraps up the FY 2009 appropriations for the remaining agencies that had been operating on a continuing resolution (CR) since the end of the 110th Congress. Included in the omnibus bill is $151.1 billion in federal R&D, an increase of $6.8 billion or 4.7 percent above the FY 2008 estimate. As a result, every major R&D funding agency will receive an increase greater than the expected rate of inflation, and in many cases the final FY 2009 numbers are larger than the budget request submitted by the previous administration to the 110th Congress.
Ravenman, did you read what I wrote? I said in the message immediately before that it was an appropriations bill, that it was $410 billion dollars, and that it was intentionally delayed because the Democrats were worried that Bush would veto it. Do you disagree with any of that? I also said that the President didn’t sign off on the budget, but he has to sign the appropriations bills that are written. Do you disagree with that?
I also said that the President’s budget is only a request, and that Congress can and does write its own, and when the budgets are negotiated and settled through the reconciliation process, they then have the various committees write the appropriations bills written up to actually enact the budget, and it’s these that the President must sign to become law. Is that also wrong?
I sense that you’re looking for nitpicks and terminology issues to deflect my main point, which is that the 3.52 trillion that was actually spent was not all requested by Bush, and in fact 410 billion dollars of it was signed by Obama. Do you agree? I even admitted that Bush may have signed off on much of it, but clearly the Democrats didn’t believe he’d sign off on all of it or they wouldn’t have delayed it past the election.
In any event, Obama had the ability to veto that bill, and didn’t. So he owns it. Do you disagree? If so, why? If Obama isn’t responsible for it, then why is Bush responsible for the ones that were submitted to him by Congress for his signature? The main way government bloat happens is precisely like this: Congress writes an appropriations bill full of pork and earmarks, and the President signs it even though he didn’t ask for it. Or he vetoes it if he finds it irresponsible. Either way, the buck stops with him because he’s the final authority, right? Obama could have vetoed it, and didn’t.
So far, you’ve simply criticized me for not knowing the specific details of the budgetary process. You might be right - I’m just a hobbyist. I don’t have a degree in political science, I’m not a lawyer, and I’ve never been in government. I’m not even American. So it’s possible my understanding is deficient.
So if that’s true, then please tell me where I’m wrong in places that affect the point I’m making. Not irrelevancies about terminology.
How much additional spending, other than the stimulus, do you believe congressional Democrats added to Bush’s budget request? I have the precise number, but I’m curious what you think.
Yes, I read what you wrote. Look at this: “So what happened is that Bush submitted a 3.1 trillion dollar budget… Then in April they submitted it for President Obama’s signature, with 410 billion in new spending added on that Bush didn’t want.” You are saying that the $410 billion is new spending that Bush didn’t want. This is wrong. The Democrats did add some money to Bush’s budget request, but it isn’t $410 billion. The number of what Democrats added is what I’m asking adaher about, and it isn’t even close to $410 billion.
I also read what you wrote about interest on the debt being another source of lots of additional spending, which is not true. You said that Bush’s 2009 budget was prepared in the recession, and you were off by one year. You said that Congress approved a $3.5 trillion budget in 2009, and that never happened. You’ve made plenty of factual mistakes aside from any of my “nitpicking” over “terminology.” I’m not sure you really acknowledge those factual mistakes, either, but oh well.
Sam, the major substantive problem with all your arguments is that you seem to believe that whatever number that Congress and the President come out with for an estimate of total spending, that the number is actually a cap on spending. This seems like a reasonable assumption, but it isn’t true.
Let’s remove this from Bush-Obama disputes for a moment so hopefully I can illustrate the problem here. Let’s say President Muffley proposes a budget of $1 trillion. Of that figure, roughly 1/3rd of it will be for discretionary programs that are under the direct control of Congress that only receive funds once an appropriations bill is passed. Congress often adds several billion to discretionary programs, too, and all that extra funding must appear in appropriations bills.
Let’s fast-forward a year and we see that as the government is closing the books on that fiscal year, and spending ended up being $1.1 trillion. Does that mean that Congress added $100 billion in spending? If we look back at the prior year, we see that Congress added $10 billion in discretionary spending. How did the country spend an additional $90 billion?
Did Congress add another $90 billion to the budget? Did President Muffley add another $90 billion to the budget? It is possible that Muffley’s budget did not estimate, or could not have anticipated, some event that cause mandatory programs to spend more. For example, a downturn in the economy leads more people to seek jobless benefits. Neither Congress nor the President do anything to approve the additional jobless benefits: there’s no vote, there’s no presidential direction, nothing. If more poor or old people get sick for some reason, spending on those programs go up like they are on autopilot. That doesn’t mean that anyone in government made the decision to spend more.
Spending on entitlements works almost exactly the way that revenues work: if revenues go up, that doesn’t mean tax rates were increased by Congress or the President. It just means that previous estimates of revenues/mandatory programs were overtaken by events. And keep in mind that this “autopilot” applies to 2/3rds of all government spending.
A lot of your recent posts have focused on what happened in 2008 and 2009. I don’t find one year to be very instructive on what Obama’s budget policies have been, because frankly 2009 was a trainwreck of confusing spending and tax decisions. I think it is more useful to look at all of the last four years rather than micro-analyzing one fiscal year. How about we focus our debate more on how spending has changed over the last four years, rather than trying to micro-analyze who gets credit for what happened in late 2008 vs. early 2009?
(At some point I wish to correct a few things about how you understand the budget process, but this post is long enough already.)
They were not, or are they lies, he thought that the opposition would want what was best for the country, they don’t seem to, just want their ideas to be the law or way to solve the problems. They started to call his policies failed from the first day he was in office and did all they could to see they didn’t succeed.
Look at the past 2 Republican presidents and see why a Democrat was elected in the first place. Then consider if Romney is elected and see if the country’s problem’s are solved. Too many vote their religious beliefs hoping that their beliefs will be the law of the land and don’t consider the fact that all religions (or none) are protected by the amendment of separation of Church and State!We will still be paying for the wars, (and any new one’s under Romney),and the debt will grow. Wars cost a lot of money, one reason the USSR failed, they put too much into preparing for war,and none to the country’s needs.
Indeed I did spell Afghanistan wrong. I should have edited my post. We are and will be spending money in Iraq and Afghanistan for many years. Obama did what the Pentagon suggested. of course there are different opinions,but things are not going well, and they won’t get better under Romney! It is wonderful that you seem to think President Obama is capable of having the same knowledge as God!:dubious:
You also have to count how much Obama wanted to spend after the GOP took control of Congress. His 2011 budget request had over $100 billion lopped off it.
Sorry, you are wrong. Remember we are excluding the stimulus: the omnibus appropriations bill passed in March 2009 cost $410 billion, but it added only $19 billion to Bush’s request for funding those agencies. Cite from the Heritage Foundation, quoting Congressional Quarterly:
Do you want to take another guess at the biggest reason why spending has increased over the last several years? Hint: Bush’s 2009 estimate for tax receipts was $2.669 trillion, and his budget estimated receipts of $2.931 trillion for 2010. The actual amount collected was $2.104 trillion in 2009 and $2.162 trillion in 2010. Did Congress and Obama somehow cut taxes by more than a trillion dollars over those two years? If they did not, then maybe something else happened… like, existing laws lead to budget estimates that were overtaken by events… hmm, if it can happen on the tax side of the ledger, could a similar thing also happen to mandatory spending programs?
Mandatory spending programs should be dropping as unemployment drops. That’s not happening because Democrats increased eligibility. So you can’t claim that Democrats aren’t responsible for mandatory spending increases. Furthermore, regardless of whether it was stimulus or not, Democrats are responsible for the 2009 budget being $3.5 trillion instead of $3.1 trillion. ANd since stimulus spending was temporary, the budget should have dropped to normal levels when the stimulus ended. That did not happen. The stimulus worked in part by increasing spending baselines in various programs. Democrats have tried to make those new higher baselines permanent. Thus, instead of spending dropping to $3.4 trillion in FY 2011(that assumes a rather generous 5% growth year over year plus the expiration of the stimulus), President Obama requested a whopping $400 billion more than that in his FY2011 budget request.
The President’s budget calls for a “new normal” of 22-23% of GDP being spent from here on. There’s just no way he doesn’t own that.
The President’s FY2013 budget request again calls for $3.8 trillion. That’s over 6% growth rate per year, which would make Obama’s desire to spend higher than most Presidents in the post-war era.
That’s pretty much what it was in the Reagan-Bush#1 era, when it ranged from ~21.2 to 23.5% of GDP. It wasn’t until the boom years of Clinton that it dropped down to just above 18% of GDP by the end of the good times. It has been rising back up again under both GW Bush and now Obama (see http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/hist01z2.xls ), not surprising given the dismal economy, the retiring of the baby boomers, the growth in medical (and hence Medicare) costs, and the growth in anti-terrorism spending.
The average of the postwar era is 21%. And there is absolutely no excuse for the President to ask for a 5.2% increase in spending in FY2013. That’s huge and mandatory spending should be going down from 2012 to 2013 as unemployment falls.
Off the top of my head, Obamacare and extension of unemployment benefits are the biggest changes to mandatory programs I can think of that were enacted in the last several years. Obamacare spending is quote low right now, and unemployment benefits cost around $44 billion a year.
And by the way, what is the deal with the argument that the jobless rate is going down so mandatory spending should be coming down? I thought conservatives were all about arguing how high unemployment is, and how it isn’t coming down. Well, anyway.
If you look through table 8.5 (pretty much right in the middle) you’ll see what mandatory spending is increasing. Medicare has gone from $385 billion in 2008 to $478 billion in 2012 (with more increases expected in future years). Unemployment compensation went from $42 billion in 2008 to $105 billion in 2012, and it is indeed projected to taper off. Food and nutrition assistance went from $53 billion in 2008 to $105 billion today, and is slowly tapering off. Social Security went from $612 billion in 2008 to $772 billion today, and will continue to climb unless a right-wing government comes in and decides to cut Social Security for retired and retirement-age Americans, which is something that even George Bush and Paul Ryan never proposed to do.
I’ve said several times in this thread that Obama is in charge and has responsibility for what goes on in the country. However, right-wingers incorrectly charge that Obama has done things other than the stimulus to permanently raise government spending. As I’m showing you, the rise the government spending has much, much more to do with the recession and baby boomers retiring than any secret spending bill that was passed without anyone noticing.
How many times can you repeat something that is literally untrue? This fabricated right-wing meme is just unsupported by the facts. Here’s the deal, as I’ve repeated several times but you cannot actually respond to other than by repeating this baseless charge: the stimulus that you get all worked up about – the roads, the rural broadband, the energy subsidies, all that kind of stuff – was discretionary spending. Look on my previous link at table 8.7. That shows how much is proposed to be spend on discretionary programs: it went from $1.134 trillion in 2008, up to $1.3 trillion or so from 2010-2012, and is proposed to taper back off again in the $1.1 trillion range over the next few years. Accounting for inflation, government is going to shrink under the Obama budget plan for the next few years.
Keep in mind that the stimulus wasn’t spent in one year, most of the outlays were in 2009 and 2010, and we’re still spending the last of that money today.
The fact is that entitlements payments, like Social Security, are growing faster than the rest of the budget is shrinking. Every single American who pays attention to this stuff should know that Social Security benefits are going to cost more and more as baby boomers retire, it’s just friggin’ obvious. But you cannot look at the top line spending and leap to the conclusion that Obama has implemented some secret plan for more spending… you can’t even correct identify what parts of the budget are growing.
Again: most of the growth in government spending is due to the cost of complying with current (and long standing) benefits laws. Just because that cost goes up, doesn’t mean “Obama increased spending,” no more than if revenues go down that would mean that “Obama must have cut taxes.”