There was an article in Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) that makes the claim that Obama will preside over the largest decreases in Federal budget deficits as a percentage of GDP. Here is the graph from the article.
For those who gobble up Leftist propaganda without diving deeper (i.e. low information voters), this graph proves (yes proves!!!) that Obama is a very austere President. I’ve already proved that he isn’t (here, here and here) but I’ll go through this exercise one more time and present this same data in another way.
Using this site, here is a graph of Federal spending as a percentage of GDP.
See that increase on the far right? That happened during the Obama administration and it’s the highest we’ve seen since WWII. This is Federal spending normalized to GDP so this is a fair metric to compare to previous Presidents.
Using this site, I now will look at just the Federal deficit as a percentage of GDP (which the IBD article focuses on).
That last nosedive at the far right is the ‘estimated’ spending for 2013 and sure enough that is a significant decrease. But when you’ve run record Federal deficits for 4 years and your economic policies have produces (at best) a sluggish ‘recovery’ then any small cuts in spending will have a big percentage decrease from previous years. This is especially true when you are dividing those deficit amounts by an anemic GDP number.
Is someone really trying to make the case that running Federal deficit to GDP ratios of 5.5% is something to be happy about? Reducing Federal deficit to GDP ratios from 8-10% to 5.5% (which is still the highest in recent history) is not worthy of praise. If my kids get D’s on their report cards but bring them up to C’s the next quarter, my wife and I will not reward them with a trip to Disney World.
Math is really hard for Leftists and the Low Information Voters.
cosmoscon 
Excellent, Cosmo.
Just like everything else in this government, these ‘reduced’ numbers are smoke-and-mirrors.
The Left knows that the average person doesn’t know the difference between the debt and the deficit, nor do they really understand GDP, etc.,..
So, they lie with impunity, knowing the Media won’t challenge their claims.
As you said, “Reducing Federal deficit to GDP ratios from 8-10% to 5.5% (which is still the highest in recent history) is not worthy of praise.”
It also does nothing to to reduce the Debt.
Obama’s SOTU speech was filled with half-truths like that, such as when he touted his +6 million jobs number. The only problem with his figure is that it is gross, not net.
It’s Washington-ese, and Obama speaks it as well as anyone has for a very long time. But just because someone’s good at lying doesn’t mean we congratulate them on their skill.
Good post: always love it when you bring out the charts…
Like you, JTR, I had to laugh out loud at the “6+ million jobs comment”. The reality is that it’s more likely less than 2 million, while the universe of available jobs has reduced by OVER 2 million. Still, they insist on counting temporary part time workers such as Census folks, et al. The U3 unemployment figure is a joke and is clearly manipulated by the Administration and supported by the US Pravda to give a grotesquely false impression of economic recovery. I guess soon, we’ll be hearing about our 5th “summer of recovery”…….
IBD should know better.