Obama & Liberal lies on spending

cris · September 11, 2012

Liberals flat out lying .....Again :rolleyes:

White House and MSNBC Cite Bogus Report Claiming 'Obama Spending Binge Never Happened'

A bogus report published by MarketWatch Tuesday claiming "under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s" has been all the rage at the White House and MSNBC.

Nutting created the following rather misleading chart for readers:

But what the folks at MSNBC and Carney ignored was the following in Nutting's nutty piece:

• In the 2009 fiscal year — the last of George W. Bush’s presidency — federal spending rose by 17.9% from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. Check the official numbers at the Office of Management and Budget.

• In fiscal 2010 — the first budget under Obama — spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion.

• In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion.

Nutting then played a little sleight of hand with readers by switching from OMB's numbers to the Congressional Budget Office's:

• In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August.

• Finally in fiscal 2013 — the final budget of Obama’s term — spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion. Read the CBO’s latest budget outlook.

Why make the switch to CBO? Is it because its projections are more conservative than Obama's OMB which forecasts spending of $3.8 trillion for FY 2012 and FY 2013?

That would change Nutting's report significantly wouldn't it?

But more importantly, much of his premise is entirely flawed.

It is normally acceptable for presidents to assume responsibility for the federal budget on October 1 the year they're sworn in.

As we operate on a fiscal year versus a calendar year, the budget of the first roughly eight months under a new president was established by the old one.

In Obama's case, that budget initially estimated spending for FY 2009 at $3.1 trillion.

Unfortunately, things didn't work out that way as with the coming of the financial collapse, spending for FY 2009 was far greater than originally planned.

Nutting for some reason decided to place all this on Bush:

he forgets that Obama was a Senator before becoming President.

The junior senator from Illinois voted for the FY 2009 budget and voted for the the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 in October of that year which included the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP).

This has always been a point of contention for conservatives: how do you inherit what you voted for? Obama could only claim to inherit the FY 2009 budget if he voted against it and voted against all the additional suspending associated with it.

As he didn't oppose all this spending when he was a Senator, he can't absolve himself of responsibility for it and neither should Nutting, Carney, or the shills at MSNBC in his behalf.

Furthermore, as Coulter noted, there was additional spending in 2009 that was specifically authorized by Obama that Nutting totally ignored:

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.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/05/24/msnbc-and-white-house-cite-bogus-report-claiming-obama-spending-binge