I am going to have seriously consider voting for Pres. Obama

[Brainfade]

I'll need to dig deeper, but if this is true, I may actually consider changing my perspective. We shall see: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/05/24/who-is-the-smallest-government-spender-since-eisenhower-would-you-believe-its-barack-obama/

ItÃÔ enough to make even the most ardent Obama cynic scratch his head in confusion. Amidst all the cries of Barack Obama being the most prolific big government spender the nation has ever suffered, Marketwatch is reporting that our president has actually been tighter with a buck than any United States president since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Who knew? Check out the chart So, how have the Republicans managed to persuade Americans to buy into the whole Å°bama as big spender narrative? It might have something to do with the first year of the Obama presidency where the federal budget increased a whopping 17.9% ÃÈoing from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. IÃÃl bet you think that this is the result of the Obama sponsored stimulus plan that is so frequently vilified by the conservatives©Ãut you would be wrong. The first year of any incoming president term is saddledÃÇor better or for worseÃØith the budget set by the president whom immediately precedes the new occupant of the White House. Indeed, not only was the 2009 budget the property of George W. BushÃÂnd passed by the 2008 CongressÃÊt was in effect four months before Barack Obama took the oath of office. Accordingly, the first budget that can be blamed on our current president began in 2010 with the budgets running through and including including fiscal year 2013 standing as charges on the Obama account, even if a President Willard M. Romney takes over the office on January 20, 2013. So, how do the actual Obama annual budgets look? Courtesy of Marketwatch- In fiscal 2010 (the first Obama budget) spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion. In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion. In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget OfficeÃÔ estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August. Finally in fiscal 2013 the final budget of ObamaÃÔ term spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion. Read the CBOÃÔ latest budget outlook. No doubt, many will wish to give the credit to the efforts of the GOP controlled House of Representatives. ThatÃÔ fine if thatÃÔ what works for you. However, you donÃÕ get to have it both ways. Credit whom you will, but if you are truly interested in a fair analysis of the Obama years to dateÃÂt least when it comes to spendingÃÚouÃÓe going to have to acknowledge that under the Obama watch, even President Reagan would have to give our current president a thumbs up when it comes to his record for stretching a dollar.

[punjabi_khota]

Well if that happens, we better remove the politics section then. There will be nothing left to discuss.

[Ram]

Wait, what? The blatantly right-wing pro-rich magazine like Forbes publishes a pro-Obama article? :hmmmm:

[Alchemist]

Wait' date=' what? The blatantly right-wing pro-rich magazine like Forbes publishes a pro-Obama article? :hmmmm:[/quote'] That happens sometimes.....I have seen Pro Republican articles in TIMES too.

[G_B_]

its not the spending which is the problem its the spending as a ratio to the revenue. One side of the story i am afraid. The republicans have a point when they attack the large budget deficit. The republicans are wrong when they dont want to increases taxes or cut military spending the bridge that hole. Even some republican states have large budget deficits. Some democrats ones like california have monster budget deficits. The stat we should be looking for is Debt to GDP ratio. Under Obama that has sky rocketed. (as it has in the other developed countries especially europe).

[punjabi_khota]

^How did it do under Bush ?

[G_B_]

badly but Bush was a social conservative and not a fiscal hawk, which is exactly what Romney is.(a hawk) I also dont see anybody mentioning Bush cause they know what he did was wrong. But the bottom-line remains, spending is always in proportion with revenue. You cant separate one from the other. Based on that metric Clinton was the one in recent times to get a budget surplus

[G_B_]

btw its not hard to notice that Ryan and Romney come from blue states ie they have made their political inroads in blue states (Wisconsin and MA) Usually Republicans in blue states are fiscal hawks. (i use the term usually)

[punjabi_khota]

Lol Ryan is a fiscal hawk ? Or is he pretending to be ? He is just another republican, who voted 90% of time with his party under Bush (and Obama). Bullcrap. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79688.html Voted FOR: TARP Auto BailOut Both Wars Medicare expansion

[Clarke]

Stop fooling around, i bet u'd vote for Bachmann/Santorum/Cain or Bush's third term if he was legally running over this President :haha:

[Brainfade]

Stop fooling around' date=' i bet u'd vote for Bachmann/Santorum/Cain or Bush's third term if he was legally running over this President :haha:[/quote'] BS.

[ravishingravi]

Have to say this Obama is hardly impressive. But looking at the nutwing calling themselves conservatives, you can't wait to jump into his arms. The level of ignorance, lack of clarity, absence of figures and same old rhetoric for all issues is shocking.

[anotherhawkeye]

Have to say this Obama is hardly impressive. But looking at the nutwing calling themselves conservatives' date=' you can't wait to jump into his arms. The level of ignorance, lack of clarity, absence of figures and same old rhetoric for all issues is shocking.[/quote'] As they say here : amen.

[suraj]

US needs Manmohan Singh- Finance Minister in the guise of leader :two_thumbs_up:

[coffee_rules]

All are asking for details about their plans to change economy, nobody is ready yet. Both conventions were useless for the undecided voters. America has political divide around 40-30 conservatives to liberals, rest are undecided moderates. Whoever the moderates side upon will win. Gore rode on the non-popularity of Clinton, hence lost. Bush second term was won again on war and other matters like Kerry's unacceptable charm or non-charm. Obama is winning only on charm. The undecided mostly turns towards who looks good, I think. Economy gaye bhaad mein.

[Clarke]

BS.

I've heard/read the same thing from right wingers pretending to be moderates: my primary concern is the debt and i don't know about the other candidate but Obama surely isn't the answer. Insert sponge bob to talk about tax cuts, lower deficit and increased defense spending to take the spot of the other candidate and he'll still win all your votes. If the forbes article were true, you'll dig up some other excuse "OMG he said you didn't build it, that Socialist!!!" which he himself said he's not happy with the choice of words while the other side is allowed to get away with openly claiming to ignore facts.

[Stuge]

US needs Manmohan Singh- Finance Minister in the guise of leader :two_thumbs_up:

He can;t work without remote control :hysterical::hysterical:

[Brainfade]

I've heard/read the same thing from right wingers pretending to be moderates: my primary concern is the debt and i don't know about the other candidate but Obama surely isn't the answer. Insert sponge bob to talk about tax cuts, lower deficit and increased defense spending to take the spot of the other candidate and he'll still win all your votes. If the forbes article were true, you'll dig up some other excuse "OMG he said you didn't build it, that Socialist!!!" which he himself said he's not happy with the choice of words while the other side is allowed to get away with openly claiming to ignore facts.

I cannot cure you of cynicism. I haven't found anything substantive to dispute the Forbes article, yet. So, if in the next 60 days, I don't find anything to dispute it, I may just have to grit my teeth and vote for your man.

[punjabi_khota]

Forum to close in 60 days.

[Brainfade]

Clarke, this one's for you: http://www.openmarket.org/2012/05/25/no-obama-is-not-the-smallest-government-spender-since-eisenhower/

As Reason Magazine’s Peter Suderman and AEI’s James Pethokoukis have noted, federal spending under the Obama administration has been at historic highs, consuming 24 percent of the economy, on average, compared to around 20 percent under George Bush, and 20 percent or less in most years since the end of World War II. (That percentage holds true even if you blame Bush for the record spending in 2009 after he left office, which is somewhat misleading). In 2011, the federal budget reached $3.6 trillion, compared to $2.9 trillion in 2008. By contrast, under the Eisenhower administration, the federal budget ranged from $76 billion in 1953, to $97 billion in 1961, according to the World Almanac. So Obama is obviously a bigger spender than either Bush, or Eisenhower, contrary to Rick Ungar’s absurd claim that Obama is “the smallest government spender since Eisenhower.” Ungar cites the claims of a liberal reporter, MarketWatch’s Rex Nutting, who has claimed that “under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower.” As the Washington Examiner notes, this is misleading, since it largely blames Bush for $400 billion in spending in 2009 that Obama was responsible for, including major spending increases that Bush had opposed: 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. Treating the inflated 2009 federal budget as the benchmark for whether Obama is overspending is ridiculous. It contained billions of dollars in extraordinary spending on bailouts and expenses related to the 2008 financial crisis. Yet, as Reason’s Peter Suderman notes, “what Obama did in subsequent budgets was stick to that newly inflated level of spending. Outlays in 2010 were just a hair short of $3.5 trillion. In 2011, they rose further, approaching $3.6 trillion.” As AEI’s Pethokoukis notes, Obama chose not to reverse that elevated level of spending; thus he, along with congressional Democrats, are responsible for it. Only by establishing 2009 as the new baseline, something Republican budget hawks like Paul Ryan feared would happen, does Obama come off looking like a tightwad. Obama has turned a one-off surge in spending due to the Great Recession into his permanent New Normal through 2016 and beyond. It’s as if one of my teenagers crashed our family minivan, and I had to buy a new one. And then, since I liked that new car smell so much, I decided to buy a new van every year for the rest of my life. I would indeed be a reckless spender. Obama can’t avoid responsibility for 2009, either. As a columnist notes, 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. 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. This, too, is 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 Obama had his way, spending would have been even bigger than it is, since the Congress has not approved as much spending as Obama sought in his budget proposals, as Nutting himself has conceded. As the Congressional Budget Office has noted, “The President’s proposals would add $4.8 trillion to the national debt,” increasing “the cumulative deficit from 2010 to 2019 to $9.3 trillion.” By contrast, Bush wanted to spend less than the liberal Congress that was elected in 2006. Spending went up from $2.784 trillion in 2007 to $2.901 trillion in 2008 and $3.5 trillion in 2009. (However, Bush himself was a big spender, who increased spending at a faster rate than his predecessor did. To outspend Bush takes real effort, and neither he nor Obama should be treated as the “new normal” for justifying yet more spending binges.) You may wonder why I am even citing the blogger Rick Ungar, who is not an economist, but rather a left-wing lawyer who wants more government control of the health care system. Ungar is a blogger at Forbes who gets his traffic there partly due to the man-bites-dog-quality of the “conservative” Forbes seemingly endorsing all sorts of left-wing talking points and legends promoted on Ungar’s blog. (Forbes’ publisher, unlike many of its staff, is conservative.) For example, this link describes Ungar’s blog post as an assertion by Forbes itself that Obama is “the smallest government spender since Eisenhower.” The fact that Ungar’s blog is on the web site of the supposedly conservative Forbes Magazine enables liberals like Roger Ebert to say that “even Forbes, of all places” agrees with whatever is the factually-baseless liberal taking-point of the day, by linking to Ungar’s blog on the site. Everything Ungar says in favor of big government, or against free market-oriented economic policies, is treated by those who agree with him as a confession or admission by a conservative magazine that markets don’t work, or that the conservative reformers that Ungar criticizes must be extremists to be criticized even at Forbes. Ungar’s most famous blog post was a self-contradictory, assume-your-own-conclusion blog post in which he claimed it was a “lie” for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to say he wanted state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to “contribute more” to their pension and health insurance plans, because, Ungar claimed, these workers already paid 100 percent of such costs. Of course, as both the conservative National Review and the liberal Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (which endorsed Obama and opposed Governor Walker’s collective bargaining reforms) noted, state workers did not pay 100 percent of their pension and health costs. So Ungar was completely wrong on the facts. State labor unions objected to Governor Walker’s reforms precisely because state workers did NOT pay most of their health care costs, but would have been required to pay an increased (but still far less than 100 percent) share of their healthcare costs under his reforms. Ungar alleged that Governor Walker had claimed that the state workers had received a “gift” of health insurance and pension costs from the state, but Walker never said anything of the kind, or claimed it was a “gift,” as opposed to a costly bargained-for provision of a collective bargaining agreement; this “gift” assertion was just the peculiar inference Ungar himself drew from the combination of Walker’s statement that he wanted state employees to pay a greater fraction of their health and pension costs, and Ungar’s own factually inaccurate assumption that state workers already paid all of their health care and pension costs (an assumption based on his erroneous interpretation of a faulty analysis by David Cay Johnston, who was a writer for the left-wing magazine The Nation). This factually-inaccurate blog post has been tweeted 5,139 times, mostly after it was tweeted by liberal critic Roger Ebert, who said that “even Forbes” had supposedly debunked Governor Walker’s claims (when it was Ungar — not Forbes itself — that had attacked Walker).

Devil meets details.