Using and slightly tweaking Nutting’s methodology, we recalculated spending increases under each president back to Dwight Eisenhower and produced tables ranking the presidents from highest spenders to lowest spenders. By contrast, both the Fact Checker and the AP zeroed in on one narrower (and admittedly crucial) data point – how to divide the responsibility between George W. Bush and Obama for the spending that occurred in fiscal year 2009, when spending rose fastest.
How you divide the spending between Bush and Obama for fiscal 2009 only makes a difference to our ruling if the shifts move Obama significantly up or down our rankings. Do they?
Nutting attributed spending from the first year of every presidential term to the previous administration, arguing that every new president starts their term four months into a fiscal year begun under their predecessor. Historically, this has not been a particularly controversial approach, and even some of Nutting’s critics we spoke to agreed that it’s not a bad rule of thumb.
But fiscal year 2009 was special because it came amid an economic and financial free fall that drove the nation’s leaders to spend a lot more than they ordinarily would. Nutting did take these factors into account, but not to the extent that some critics think is needed. Nutting shifted $140 billion in fiscal 2009 spending from two of Obama’s signature programs – the economic stimulus package and an expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program – out of Bush’s column and into Obama’s. He also shifted excess spending beyond what Bush would have spent from the appropriations bills signed by Obama in 2009.
A number of critics also argued that spending for the Troubled Asset Relief Program should be taken into account. This program aided troubled financial institutions and involved a lot of money going out the door in fiscal 2009 and a lot of money coming in the door in subsequent years as the money was paid back to the treasury. The critics note that counting the TARP expenses as Bush’s artificially raises the baseline level of spending Obama inherited, thereby making Obama’s subsequent spending increases seem unrealistically small.
We think reasonable people can disagree on which president should be responsible for TARP spending, but to give the critics their say, we’ll include it in our alternative calculation. So, combining the fiscal 2009 costs for programs that are either clearly or arguably Obama’s – the stimulus, the CHIP expansion, the incremental increase in appropriations over Bush’s level and TARP – produces a shift from Bush to Obama of between $307 billion and $456 billion, based on the most reasonable estimates we’ve seen critics offer.
That’s quite a bit larger than Nutting’s $140 billion, but by our calculations, it would only raise Obama’s average annual spending increase from 1.4 percent to somewhere between 3.4 percent and 4.9 percent. That would place Obama either second from the bottom or third from the bottom out of the 10 presidents we rated, rather than last.
When we encounter a compound claim such as this one, we consider the accuracy of each part separately. During our internal discussions, we give a preliminary rating to each half of a claim, then average them to produce our final, published rating.
Our extensive consultations with budget analysts since our item was published convinces us that there’s no single “correct” way to divvy up fiscal 2009 spending, only a variety of plausible calculations. So the second portion of the Facebook claim – that Obama’s spending has risen “slower than at any time in nearly 60 years” – strikes us as Half True.
Meanwhile, we would’ve given a True rating to the Facebook claim that Romney is wrong to say that spending under Obama has “accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history.” Even using the higher of the alternative measurements, at seven presidents had a higher average annual increases in spending. That balances out to our final rating of Mostly True.
