One question for the teeming masses: Do you think it is fair for presidents to be tagged as “big spenders” for items such as Social Security, Medicare, veterans affairs, and similar programs which are guaranteed by law to be available to people?
For example, as the baby boomers retire, Social Security spending has to go up. This alone accounts for $200 billion in additional spending under Bush, and $160 billion under Obama. That’s a significant amount of money, but calling someone a “big spender” because the government is following through on a promise that was made generations ago is not quite fair, IMHO.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame someone in the present for policies structured in the past, but I do think that if there is room for optimization/reform, it should be leveraged.
Dare I suggest this, too, but I think maybe it is also worth considering the notion that some promises maybe can’t be kept. It doesn’t mean we have to eliminate the promise altogether, but sometimes damage needs to be spread out and minimized instead of hammering it onto people that are the least equipped to handle it. That’s just kicking the can down the road and causing a bad problem to become worse.
I must conclude that, Bush notwithstanding, yorick is correct. Spending under Obama only appears relatively low when measured against the artificially high benchmark of 2009.
The only mistake here is your constant referencing of Bush, Bush, Bush! If you want to get into a pissing contest about which of the two presidents presided over the largest annual budget percent increases then please start a thread about that. The OP states, incorrectly, that Obama is the lowest spending president since Coolidge. I have tried to demonstrate that the small increase in year-to-year spending is not indicative of Obama being a tightwad. The 20% jump in spending in 2009 gave Obama some breathing room over the next two years.
I’ve also stated (I’m not sure which thread) that Obama has submitted substantially higher budget proposals that, to the credit of both Dems and Pubs, did not receive a single vote. Also, the dip in spending in 2010 and 2011 is really a distortion resulting from repayment of TARP funds by banks. So, would you like to congratulate Congress for reigning in Obama’s proposed spending?
Another point: Those 2013 CBO estimates include a whole lot of spending cuts that Obama is actively fighting against. So your back-of-the-envelope calculations are flawed anyway.
You are trying to argue something that is way too complex to argue…even comparing two presidents. As I’ve stated percent increase is a meaningless number that can be manipulated any number of ways.
As an aside…you are not going to find many conservatives that will claim Bush was tight fisted with money either. So, feel free to keep arguing that Bush spent too much. Let’s just stop pretending that Obama is a skin flint.
yorick73: you’ve talked a lot about the increase in spending from 2008 (or thereabouts) and today. Do you have a sense of what spending, in a general sense, has increased so greatly over that time?
The increase in spending from 2008 through the end of 2011 (the last full year of data which is available) is roughly $610 billion per year. The stimulus had $290 billion in tax cuts and $140 billion in transfer payments to states. The remaining $350 billion was basically one-time spending increases. So, the contention that the stimulus raised the bar on domestic spending which has since been carried forward doesn’t seem to add up.
It just seems strange to me that people can say that Obama is a big spender, but also seem unable to point to what the additional spending is being used for.
Well, I’ll tell you. From 2008 to 2011, an additional $90 billion went to defense. An additional $95 billion went to Medicare. An additional $112 billion went to Social Security. An additional $166 billion went to income security programs, which include unemployment, food stamps, and Federal retirement pensions. An additional $43 billion went to veterans services. That’s about $500 billion worth of spending right there.
Now, I will hazard that if one asked the typical American if s/he wants to cut defense by 20%, cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, cut food stamps, cut pensions, cut veterans benefits, and cut unemployment, they would probably respond that the questioner must have fallen off the stupid truck.
I think it’s pretty easy to complain that there’s too much spending, but when you look at some details, and where the money is really going, I think the complaint that Obama is reckless with spending does not seem so apparent.
What was the $90 billion increase in defense spending? I was under the impression that defense had pretty much been frozen during the current administration.
Those one-time spending increases were added to the budgets of individual federal agencies. Those have not, as far as I can tell, gone away. If you look at the numbers from the 2009 budget and compare them to the percent increase or decrease in the 2010 budget the numbers don’t add up. Granted those are Wikipedia links so it’s possible there are errors.
Here is one example: HHS went from 70.4 billion in '09 to 78.7 billion in ‘10 for an annual DECREASE of 1.7%. That seems to suggest that the stimulus spending was added to the individual agencies’ baseline budget in '09…unless I am missing something really basic here. If so, somebody please point it out. I don’t have time to go through ARRA and count up all the spending for individual agencies but if someone has a link that shows stimulus spending for each agency that would be helpful.
I would have to do more research on that. It can’t be health care alone, as I’ve read articles recently that peg DoD’s health care costs around $50 billion a year.
Apples and oranges to the figures I provided earlier. I’m looking at the actual expenditures, you’re comparing what was provided one year to what was proposed the next. Look at table 3.1 on pages 54 and 55 of this PDF. You can compare yourself what was actually spent on categories of government spending.
One has to be a little careful of comparing budget numbers because of the difference between budget authority and outlays. Budget authority is what is provided in an appropriation, like the annual budget or the stimulus. That money may be spent over several years’ time. For example, if we give the Department of Transportation $50 million to build a road in 2009, it may take a while to negotiate the contract and build the road, meaning that the outlays – the actual money coming out of the treasury – might occur in 2010 and 2011. Deficits are always calculated as outlays, agency budgets are always calculated as budget authority. So, as you compare agency budgets to actual government spending from different sources of information, keep in mind whether they are measuring the same thing.
For an apples-to-apples comparison, look at table 5.4 on pages 119 and 120. Look at HHS: in 2008, they had $72 billion in budget authority. In 2009, with the stimulus, they went up to $110 billion. By 2011, they are down to $77 billion again. The stimulus funding did not set a new baseline for their budget. In fact, if one excludes the stimulus, from 2008 to 2011 the rate of HHS growth was in the neighborhood of 2.5%, which is just a skootch higher than inflation.
Another point that deserves to be highlighted is TARP. It was meant to be, and largely has been, repaid. Nonetheless, not only what was supposed to be a loan been counted in baseline budgeting as ongoing spending, the repayments are counted as income and discounted against new spending by the Obama administration.
Informative post. This was exactly the information I was curious about earlier in the thread and it’s what I expected. The baseline budgets for various agencies were not set at a new baseline based on FY2009, which Yorick seems to want to believe. It would have been a legitimate gripe if they had, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Look though my cites and find the new spending that you allege exists. As I have clearly documented, the vast majority of new spending are entitlements that have existed for decades and for which people are now claiming their lawful benefits.
Like it or not, it is not Obama’s fault that baby boomers are retiring and drawing Social Security. It is not because of Obama’s spendthrift ways that veterans are getting the medical care that they are eligible for. If you want to hold Obama responsible for proposing that unemployment benefits be extended for people as they work their way out of a pretty bad recession, that may be a fair charge – but good luck getting the American people to think that unemployment benefits are wasteful spending that ought to be eliminated.
Thanks for the clarification. From your chart we are still spending at almost stimulus levels. Your 500 billion from a previous post only gets us about 1/3 of the way there. I realize there has been huge spending for unemployment extension and the like since 2009 (though I don’t know how much exactly). We will have to see in the years to come if this spending goes away or is transferred elsewhere.
Although agency spending has decreased since 2009 many individual agencies have seen significant boosts from 2008 levels including Education, Justice, Transportation and EPA. Of course those increases don’t get us there either.
One big problem is that there is more than one answer to the question “how much did the federal goverment spend?” I’ve seen on-budget spending, on- and off-budget spending, on- and off-budget spending with negative outlays removed, and I’m sure there are other ways to look at the total. These numbers can differ by more than a trillion dollars. Not to mention lower interest rates on the debt can make it seem like we are spending less when we are just spending less on debt service. It is very difficult to put a finger on the correct numbers.
I flipped Obama’s submitted budget from 2010 and 2011. Every single agency has a requested budget and a note stating that, in addition to that number, X billon is added from the Recovery act. I don’t know if that additional agency spending is showing up on your linked charts or not. The Recovery act was 2009 money so it may not show up in 2010 spending charts and beyond…even if the money is being doled out over time. If the Recovery additions don’t show up in the 2010 spending charts then the 2009 charts, while technically correct, do not show the actual spending for individual agencies. If this is the case then the 2010 and 2011 budget numbers for individual agencies are significantly higher.
Actually, upon flipping through the stimulus act, much of the spending goes to individual agencies and can be used up to 2013. It looks like those spending drops in individual agencies after 2009 may not be correct.
What are you talking about? The outlays from 2009 to 2011 are roughly $600 billion higher. Are you talking about being 1/3 of the way to the deficit in the last few years? You’re aware that increased spending is only responsible for a fraction of the deficit, right?
See my earlier comments about budget authority and outlays. Just look up the proper chart on the document I linked to, and you will see how the outlays are actually occuring. Outlays over time does not constitute an increase to the agency’s budget.
For example: it takes most of a decade to build an aircraft carrier. If a new carrier is funded in 2013, the money will be spent over the next five to seven years. That does not mean that a carrier funded in 2013 has increased the defense budget in 2014, 2015, or whatever year the spending actually occurs.