Thread: Numbers don’t lie, but Democrats do - more Blame it on Bush

Numbers don’t lie, but Democrats do

05/23/2012
By Ann Coulter
Political Commentator

It’s been breaking news all over MSNBC, liberal blogs, newspapers and even The Wall Street Journal: “Federal spending under Obama at historic lows … It’s clear that Obama has been the most fiscally moderate president we’ve had in 60 years.” There’s even a chart!

I’ll pause here to give you a moment to mop up the coffee on your keyboard. Good? OK, moving on …

This shocker led to around-the-clock smirk fests on MSNBC. As with all bogus social science from the left, liberals hide the numbers and proclaim: It’s “science”! This is black and white, inarguable, and why do Republicans refuse to believe facts?

Ed Schultz claimed the chart exposed “the big myth” about Obama’s spending: “This chart — the truth — very clearly shows the truth undoubtedly.” And the truth was, the “growth in spending under President Obama is the slowest out of the last five presidents.”

Note that Schultz also said that the “part of the chart representing President Obama’s term includes a stimulus package, too.” As we shall see, that is a big, fat lie.
Schultz’s guest, Reuters columnist David Cay Johnston, confirmed: “And clearly, Obama has been incredibly tight-fisted as a president.”

Everybody’s keyboard OK?

On her show, Rachel Maddow proclaimed: “Factually speaking, spending has leveled off under President Obama. Spending is not skyrocketing under President Obama. Spending is flattening out under President Obama.”

In response, three writers from “The Daily Show” said, “We’ll never top that line,” and quit.

Inasmuch as this is obviously preposterous, I checked with John Lott, one of the nation’s premier economists and author of the magnificent new book with Grover Norquist: Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future.

(I’m reviewing it soon, but you should start without me.)
It turns out Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch chart, attributes all spending during Obama’s entire first year, up to Oct. 1, to President Bush.

That’s not a joke.

That means, for example, the $825 billion stimulus bill, proposed, lobbied for, signed and spent by Obama, goes in … Bush’s column. (And if we attribute all of Bush’s spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and No Child Left Behind to William Howard Taft, Bush didn’t spend much either.)

Nutting’s “analysis” is so dishonest, even The New York Times has ignored it. He includes only the $140 billion of stimulus money spent after Oct. 1, 2009, as Obama’s spending. And he’s testy about that, grudgingly admitting that Obama “is responsible (along with the Congress) for about $140 billion in extra spending in the 2009 fiscal year from the stimulus bill.”

Nutting acts as if it’s the height of magnanimity to “attribute that $140 billion in stimulus to Obama and not to Bush …”
On what possible theory would that be Bush’s spending? Hey — we just found out that Obamacare’s going to cost triple the estimate. Let’s blame it on Calvin Coolidge!

Nutting’s “and not to Bush” line is just a sleight of hand. He’s hoping you won’t notice that he said “$140 billion” and not “$825 billion,” and will be fooled into thinking that he’s counting the entire stimulus bill as Obama’s spending. (He fooled Ed Schultz!)

The theory is that a new president is stuck with the budget of his predecessor, so the entire 2009 fiscal year should be attributed to Bush.

But Obama didn’t come in and live with the budget Bush had approved. He immediately signed off on enormous spending programs that had been specifically rejected by Bush. This included a $410 billion spending bill that Bush had refused to sign before he left office. Obama signed it on March 10, 2009. Bush had been chopping brush in Texas for two months at that point. Marketwatch’s Nutting says that’s Bush’s spending.

Obama also spent the second half of the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP). These were discretionary funds meant to prevent a market meltdown after Lehman Brothers collapsed. By the end of 2008, it was clear the panic had passed, and Bush announced that he wouldn’t need to spend the second half of the TARP money.

But on Jan. 12, 2009, Obama asked Bush to release the remaining TARP funds for Obama to spend as soon as he took office. By Oct. 1, Obama had spent another $200 billion in TARP money. That, too, gets credited to Bush, according to the creative accounting of Rex Nutting.

There are other spending bills that Obama signed in the first quarter of his presidency, bills that would be considered massive under any other president — such as the $40 billion child health care bill, which extended coverage to immigrants as well as millions of additional Americans. These, too, are called Bush’s spending.

Frustrated that he can’t shift all of Obama’s spending to Bush, Nutting also lowballs the spending estimates during the later Obama years. For example, although he claims to be using the White House’s numbers, the White House’s estimate for 2012 spending is $3.795 trillion. Nutting helpfully knocks that down to $3.63 trillion.

But all those errors pale in comparison to Nutting’s counting Obama’s nine-month spending binge as Bush’s spending.

If liberals will attribute Obama’s trillion-dollar stimulus bill to Bush, what won’t they do?

Read more: Numbers don't lie, but Democrats do | The Daily Caller

What was not mentioned is that Bush's 2009 budget, which Obama modified, is the LAST budget passed by the congress. Since then federal funding has been approved by Congress via Continuing Resolution. The problem with that is Continuing Resolutions START with the current spending levels. Thus, after Obama ADDED one half trillion dollars to the 2009 approved budget (, 410 billion Omnibus Bill), it became the new spending baseline. Also, since Bush opposed 200 B of the TARP that Obama approved,it represents 200B that did not have to be spent. Then there is the 850 B stimulus bill that Obama signed. There are arguments over whether Bush would have, and I could not find a separate line for in the budget info I saw, so for the sake of argument, spit the diference, and Obama adds at least another 400B to 2009 expenditures that Bush did not approve.

So the 2010 CR did not start with the 2009 budget, it started with the 2009 budget PLUS the one half trillion dollar add-on, plus at least another 600B that if approved at all was onlhy approved for 2009. Total expenditures for 2009 became the new baseline for the 2010 budget continuing resolution. There were no cuts in the 2010 CR, so all the new expenditures were added to the 2010 baseline and became the new baseline for 2011. Bear in mind again, these continuing resolutions base the budgeting on the actual expenditures for preceding year, so presumed 'one time expenditures' such as TARP, Omnibus Spending Bill, Stimulus Package, etc get rolled into the Continuing Resolution budget. So when Obama whines that he wants more stimulus, he already has it, 3 times over. Yet he can say he is not really adding much because the 2010 CR budget was not much more than the 2009 approved budget, and the 2011 and 2012 CR budgets were not much more than the 2010 CR budget. Right. Because the 2009 add-ons and optional expenditures totaling at least one trillion dollars continue to be rolled into the Continuing Resolution budgets. All because Obama, Reid and Pelosi refused to pass a budget, thus enabling them to hide these increase in continuing resolutions.

Regardless of how the Dems and Obama try to frame it, the annual budget deficit has tripled in 3 and one half years. And as much as I regret it, and most would wish to ignore it, Obama was president during this period. Every expenditure that he signed is his responsibility, not some previous President. Likewise the debt increase is his responsibility also. If he is so fiscally responsible, why did he allow the Democrat controlled congress to FAIL to pass a budget for two years? When the GOP took over the House, why did Obama allow the Democrat controlled Senate to stifle the House's efforts to pass a budget? Simple, it is easier to fudge the numbers with continuing resolution baseline budgeting than it is to be held accountable to a real budget with line items and have to review or debate the need for those line items or the expenditures associated with them. They are trying use this as cover so Obama can claim he is the most fiscally responsible of the last 5 presidents when in actual fact his excessive spending exceeds the debts of ALL OTHER PRESIDENTS COMBINED. How can anyone even consider voting for a liar this brazen.

Numbers don't lie, but Democrats do


They all lie rebugnants, democ-rats all our illustrious so called politicians protectors of the public..more like protectors of the troth...all you have to look at is all the policies they have passed against us .....