No, you are correct. We have not had a budget since 2009. War spending for 2009 was an appropriation bill signed by Obama
Doesn’t that account for a lot of the increase, then?
The question of whether war spending is “off budget” or “on budget” has no relevance whatsoever to the deficit. Any money expended by the government, no matter how the law requiring the expenditure was passed, is counted as government spending. Even when people were making a big deal about Bush “not budgeting for the wars,” every single dime spent for the wars were counted in the deficit calucations.
One should be careful when reading that there hasn’t been a budget for many years. The budget referred to in that talking point is legislative product that is not a law, and is simply a procedural tool known as a “budget resolution.” There are other products also known as a budget that have been produced with regularity: the President proposes a budget each year to Congress. Congress passes appropriation bills every year to provide a budget to Federal departments. In years where Congress has not passed a budget resolution, it has passed “deeming resolutions” to set spending caps. And the Budget Control Act passed last summer is a budget resolution on steroids, because it is actually legally binding, as opposed to a budget resolution which is not.
So, when yorick73 says we have not had a budget since 2009, he is correct, but there is more to the story.
Thanks, Ravenman, for saying that better than I could.
Okay, Yorik, the original argument is that Obama has increased government spending less than many, other presidents, correct?
My posts show that, don’t they? Will you at least admit that he, Obama, has increased the amount of government spending less than Bush? Bush averaged 6.8 % and Obama has averaged 4.5%.
What the hell are you disputing exactly? Your argument appears to be that Obama has in fact increased spending a small amount because emergency money increased his baseline by a huge amount. But if you don’t count the amount of the baseline increase, he has increased the amount of spending less than Bush.
And the deficit is not relevant to this discussion, since the Bush tax cuts and the recession have increased the deficit by lowering revenues.
You said:
If you don’t count the 100 trillion, Obama still has increased the size of the budget less than Bush has. Your artificial spike is what I’m talking about.
Why does it even matter whether spending increased more/less in terms of raw percentage points between two Presidents? It’s such an incomplete metric.
I think we have to look at the broader context, here. Personally, I think the 2009 spending would have taken place regardless of who was in office, but maybe that’s just me being naive. When the economy is about to collapse like that, I can’t imagine any President just sitting back and saying “Let 'em fail, boys!” without causing some serious damage in the meantime.
And yes, I do recall that the pre-2009 war spending stuff was tacked back on during Obama’s term.
[QUOTE=FixMyIgnorance]
Why does it even matter whether spending increased more/less in terms of raw percentage points between two Presidents? It’s such an incomplete metric.
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Why does it matter at all, considering that the President doesn’t control the purse strings…Congress does? So, if this is the lowest spending CONGRESS since Coolidge, then you’d have to look at why that might be. One possibility that springs out (leaving aside the bump yorick73 brings up that reset the baseline spending) is that Congress is so dysfunctional right now that they can’t even agree on a firm budget…which is going to have a somewhat negative effect on expanded spending.
The thing that puzzles me here is, who is the OP and others in this thread trying to convince of Obama’s penny pinching orientation?? Is it (fiscal) conservatives? Good luck with that. Is it themselves? Liberals aren’t generally into penny pinching presidents…I’d think that the fact that ‘Obama’ hasn’t spent a ton on new ‘needed’ programs would be a black mark (except that Obama actually has little to do with it…it’s Congress that controls the purse) against ‘him’. The thread isn’t just some random statement, but I’m puzzled as to what the target audience was supposed to be here on such an assertion. 
-XT
Not necessarily. A budget isn’t the same thing as appropriations. You don’t need a budget to fund the government. And if you can’t agree on appropriations, which is also true, you end up simply using the same numbers as last year, which may end up being higher than you wanted.
It’s simple - conservatives are saying things about the President that are false.
It’s the undecided moderates and independents. They are the ones who will decide this election; the true believers are beyond reach for both parties.
First off, Yorick’s bump is meaningless, without it the numbers are still smaller, as my last few posts show.
The whole point of this is that there is a conservative meme that Obama is spending like a drunken sailor. The initial article is showing that that meme, like most modern conservative “knowledge” is actually not true.
So the point isn’t that liberals want to spend less, the point is that conservatives are shouting about something that isn’t actually happening.
Thanks for the great clarification.
The bottom line is that “on-budget” and “off-budget” are irrelevant, and a “budget” (i.e. a budget resolution) is unnecessary for Congress to spend money. Spending money is appropriations. Congress didn’t pass budget resolutions at all until the early 1970s.
I didn’t mention the deficit WRT spending increases at all. I’m fully aware that a deficit depends on total revenue which has gone down significantly as a result of the recession. I don’t think I even mentioned deficits at all but I’m too lazy to go searching through all my posts.
How can you not count the baseline increase?!? That’s the whole point of my argument. Percent increase in year-to-year spending is a meaningless number unless you take the baseline into account. The huge spike in emergency spending was for a single year (regardless of when the money is actually spent). To say that the the new year-over-year spending should necessarily include all that emergency spending as a starting point is absurd on its face.
[QUOTE=Lobohan]
First off, Yorick’s bump is meaningless, without it the numbers are still smaller, as my last few posts show.
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Sorry…YOU might have been convinced by your posts, but I remain unconvinced.
That meme is as inaccurate as certain liberals in this thread attempting to give Obama the credit for this ‘lowest spending POTUS since Coolidge’ thingy. Both are crap.
That Obama is spending like a drunken sailor? Agreed. That we are spending a lot more than we were before 2009, and that this spending level seems to be the new default? Sorry, they aren’t wrong about that. Who is to BLAME for it, however…again, sorry, but you are both wrong. It’s not Obama either blame or credit. It’s Congress.
[QUOTE=lance strongarm]
It’s simple - conservatives are saying things about the President that are false.
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Dog bites man! News at 11…
-XT
You have it exactly backwards. The percent increase is meaningless. The spike in ONE TIME spending is what matters. As I stated, if you increased the budget 100 trillion for ONE YEAR because of some emergency then, next year, spend that same amount again and consider that the new “baseline”, then your spending has increased exactly 0.0% but you would be a fool if you said you were the “lowest spending president since Coolidge”. Let’s say the following year you remove 50 trillion of the emergency spending but still keep 50 trillion from that spending in the new baseline. Spending has decreased somewhere around 50% but you are still spending a fuckload more than the pre-emergency budget. Of course you can claim to have cut spending by 50% but you’ve really increased spending by over an order of magnitude. Make sense?
This is my point. Both Bush and Obama had a hand in the 2009 increase. For the sake of this argument it makes no difference who increased the spending. The spending increase was not supposed to be added to the budget baseline but, as many warned, it has been. And now many seem to marvel at Obama’s frugality by pointing out that he has increased spending since then ever-so-slightly. It doesn’t make any sense.
You can look at total gov’t spending during the 2009 year that includes one-time emergency spending, and then look at the following years where the gov’t has spent slightly more. Something doesn’t connect here. The emergency spending was not just an increase in the budgets of federal agencies like you seem to want to state. Most of it was one-time spending. What spending is filling the gap between the pre-emergency spending baseline and the post-FY09 baseline? That’s what I’d like to know.
I think I understand your mistake.
Spending goes up for all presidents. At least usually. What you are fixating on is that the one-time bump pushed Obama to some high level, and that not increasing it much is easy, since the level got bumped.
But as I said, if you assume Obama starts at 3.1 trillion and ignore the one-time-bump, if he increased spending at the same level as Bush the 3.1 trillion would be over 4 trillion by now. Full stop.
So even without the one-time bump, if Obama increased the spending the same as Bush he’d have the budget over 4 trillion. The budget for 2013 is 3.8 trillion. Make sense?
To restate: If there was never a one-time bump and if Obama increased spending at the same rate as Bush, he’d have the budget at 4 trillion. He’s actually below that.
The one-time bump pushed first year to 3.5, then it went to 3.6, then 3.8, then 3.7, then 3.8. If Obama spent like Bush and there was no one-time bump, it would have been 3.1, 3.3, 3.5, 3.77, 4.0.
So the one-time bump you’re fixated on is spurious, because even with the bump his final numbers for the same number of years are lower than they would have been for Bush’s rate of increase.
A few other clarifying thoughts.
To determine how much of an increase in spending a president has, you take their first budget and their last budget and figure the rate of increase. Bush had 2 trillion and 3.1 trillion (the 2009 budget without the emergency stuff), that’s an average increase of 6.8% per year.
So if we look at Obama, and you don’t count the stimulus, he increased the 3.1 trillion 2009 budget to 3.8 trillion over 5 years (if you count 2013). This is an increase of 4.5% per year.
If you do count the stimulus, then Obama, gets that bump Yorick is talking about. Which is why you should discount it if you want an honest number. You’d be looking at a 1.7% increase per year. Which is what Yorick is fixating on.
The fact is, that even giving Obama the worst possible number, the 3.1 trillion, he’s still far-and-away increasing government spending much less than Bush.
I think we can all agree that Obama isn’t some hardcore uberspender – that’s just bogus myth propagated by ignorant people (and mostly the right wing). It’s just patently false.
That being said, it’s not like Obama’s a spendthrift, either, who is some optimized beacon of cost-minimizing prowess. I mean, considering the clusterfuck the economy’s been in, you’re going to need to unroll some ugly metrics to get things back on track.
It’s dishonest to swing things either way. If you’re going to evaluate a particular administration’s spending, it needs to be done in an honest way. The 2009 spending was a one-time deal that really inflated the numbers and is an outlier. It’s not a reasonable baseline.
Now, it IS fair to ask, “what was responsible for that spike in the first place?” That can’t possibly be pinned on Obama at all.
Jon Stewart on John Boehner accusing President Obama of the largest spending binge in American history: “Which came on the heels of an almost absurdly reckless decade, unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an unfunded trillion dollar Medicare prescription bill, and tax cuts for the wealthy that are the largest single policy contributor to our deficit; in fact, I myself voted for all of these…ahem, back to my original point! OBAAMAAAAAAA!”
http://veracitystew.com/2011/07/27/jon-stewarts-armadebtdon-call-congress-video/ 01:00+
I agree with this. Obama certainly would have spent more (without an obstructionist Republican minority), since he’s dealing with the real world and it requires some government spending during a recovery. But I’m just making my arguments to show that the conservative meme is based on misinformation.