The White House has promoted a May 22 column by Rex Nutting of the Wall Street Journal’sMarketWatch website that concluded “federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower.” Nutting also argued that allegations of a “reckless spending spree” by Obama constitute a “whopper” and “never happened.”
That raised howls and rebuttals from conservative stalwarts at the Wall Street Journal’s owneditorial page, at the libertarian Reason magazine, at the Heritage Foundation and even from Cato’s economist Mitchell, who called Nutting’s comparisons “nutty” in a piece for the Forbesmagazine website, even though Nutting based his analysis in part on the same $140 billion figure Mitchell uses for Obama’s fiscal 2009 spending.
Our own analysis leads us to conclude that Obama deserves responsibility for somewhat more fiscal 2009 spending than Nutting or Mitchell assign to him, as we’ve noted. Spending in that year shot up an incredible $535 billion. Nutting and Mitchell hold Obama responsible for only 26 percent of that increase, but we conclude that Obama can fairly be assigned responsibility for as much as 38 percent.
We also disagree with Nutting’s conclusion that Obama’s increases are the lowest since Eisenhower. Not only should Nutting have measured Obama’s increases from a lower base, in our judgment, he also fails to take account of inflation, which has been extraordinarily low during Obama’s term.http://www.factcheck.org/2012/06/obamas-spending-inferno-or-not/
