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Interesting. Perhaps the GOP is running not so much on what Obama's spending as much as what he proposed. They've blocked a lot of legislation and are threatening to block raising the salary cap. (When you can't address spending, address whether you pay for it.)

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ORIGINAL: SternSkipper

[image]http://images1.dailykos.com/i/user/6/Slowest_spending_growth_in_decades.jpeg[/image]

But WAIT you must be off on your figures must be off massively! Because if this is correct Mitt Romney & John Boehner (pronounced BAY-NOR ... But only in this country) are not only MAJOR FUCKING LIARS, they're pretty stupid.

I demand a recount[8|]

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ORIGINAL: DarkSteven

Interesting. Perhaps the GOP is running not so much on what Obama's spending as much as what he proposed. They've blocked a lot of legislation and are threatening to block raising the salary cap. (When you can't address spending, address whether you pay for it.)

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For over 20 years, I've watched federal taxes go down while state and local taxes skyrocket to pick up the slack--at what point do people wake up? It seems never.

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When the economy was good--they warned we needed to cut taxes. When the economy went bad--they warned we needed to cut taxes.

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I'm sensing an agenda here that doesn't give a fuck about the economy. Or anything/anyone else.

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You got that my post was faux surprise, right?

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ORIGINAL: Musicmystery

You should read what you post.

Your first link supports Maher's take;

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That last line, by the way, isn’t true. Obama’s budget plans to bring spending down to 22.5 percent of GDP in 2016 -- which is about where it was in the Reagan years, and our demographics are worse now than they were then. But Pethokoukis’s broader point is correct: The real debate here is what spending should have been in 2010 and 2011.

The Obama administration wanted it to be higher. After all, unemployment rose through 2010, and remains high today. It has proposed a raft of additional stimulus bills since 2009. Republicans in Congress, however, refused to pass most of their plans. Properly understood, the fact that inflation-adjusted spending has fallen since fiscal year 2009 is the result of Republican obstruction in Congress. That Democrats are now crowing about these numbers -- the DNC is e-mailing them around -- and that Republicans are now viciously disputing them is an embarrassment to both sides. You could as easily imagine Democrats lamenting these numbers as evidence of our failed policies and Republicans celebrating them as evidence of their congressional successes.

But Republicans don’t want to admit that they bear substantial responsibility for the economic policy of the last few years. If they did, then it would be hard to argue that the economy’s performance in 2010 and 2011 is all Obama’s fault. And the Obama administration doesn’t want to clearly say that we should have been spending more in recent years, even if that’s what they believe, and what they proposed, because it polls poorly. And so here we are.

your last one affirms that the pace of spending slowed.

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Nutting’s piece employs several abuses of the numbers (including some underhanded switching between projected and actual spending data), but his most productive sleight of hand is to assign all of fiscal year 2009′s spending to President Bush. Nutting doesn’t start the clock on Obama’s spending until fiscal 2010.

In most cases, that would be fair, because presidents typically sign the next year’s spending bills in the calendar year before they leave office. But not in 2009. The Democratic Congress, confident Obama was going to win in 2008, passed only three of fiscal 2009′s 12 appropriations bills (Defense; Military Construction and Veterans Affairs; and Homeland Security). The Democrat Congress passed the rest of them, and Obama signed them.

So whereas Bush had proposed spending just $3.11 trillion in fiscal 2009, for a 3 percent increase, Obama and the Democrats ended up spending $3.52 trillion, for a 17.9 percent increase in spending — the highest single-year percentage spending increase since the Korean War.

By the end of Obama’s first year in office, spending as a percentage of GDP was 25.2 percent, the highest it has ever been since World War II. As Obama’s stimulus spending has receded, spending as a percentage of GDP has gone down, but only slightly. Under President Bush, spending averaged 19.6 percent of GDP. Under President Clinton, it was 19.8 percent. The historical post-World War II average is 19.7 percent. In 2012, after four years of Obama’s fiscal leadership, it is expected to be 24.3 percent.

[;)]

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But Republicans don’t want to admit that they bear substantial responsibility for the economic policy of the last few years. If they did, then it would be hard to argue that the economy’s performance in 2010 and 2011 is all Obama’s fault.

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But Republicans don’t want to admit that they bear substantial responsibility for the economic policy of the last few years. If they did, then it would be hard to argue that the economy’s performance in 2010 and 2011 is all Obama’s fault.



And we have a winner.

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ORIGINAL: Musicmystery

Steven, it's never been about agenda--it's about power.

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ORIGINAL: Musicmystery
And we have a winner.