Barack Obama, Fiscal Conservative!

Barack Obama, Fiscal Conservative!

It might seem incredible that a president who has signed into law the largest federal spending in history, who has run up $5 trillion in new debt, who has submitted budgets that propose increasing the national debt to $22 trillion–budgets so extreme that not a single member of either the House or the Senate would vote for them, two years running–would somehow try to pass himself off as a fiscal conservative. But in politics, nothing, apparently, is impossible. This is the Obama campaign’s new theme: Obama as the green-eyeshade fiscal conservative.

It started with the ridiculous column by one Rex Nutting that I dismantled last night. Nutting claims that the “Obama spending binge never happened.” He says Obama has presided over the slowest growth in federal spending in modern history. Nutting achieves this counter-intuitive feat by simply omitting the first year of the Obama administration, FY 2009, when federal spending jumped $535 billion, a massive increase that has been sustained and built upon in the succeeding years. Nutting blithely attributes this FY 2009 spending to President Bush, even though 1) Obama was president for more than two-thirds of FY 2009; 2) the Democratic Congress never submitted a budget to President Bush for FY 2009, instead waiting until after Obama was inaugurated; 3) Obama signed the FY 2009 budget in March of that year; 4) Obama and the Democratic Congress spent more than $400 billion more in FY 2009 than Bush had requested in his budget proposal, which was submitted in early 2008; and 5) the stimulus bill, which ballooned FY 2009 spending, was, as we all know, enacted by the Democratic Congress and signed into law by President Obama. So for Nutting to use FY 2010 as the first year of the Obama administration for fiscal purposes was absurd. Moreover, it was largely because of the incredible explosion in federal spending in the first year of the Obama administration that the Tea Party movement sprang up, the GOP swept the 2010 elections, and federal spending has been relatively stable (although not declining, of course) since then.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/05/barack-obama-fiscal-conservative.php