Shrub has written a book and is out on a media tour promoting it. Among the strange notions the book contains is the argument that GW Bush was a fiscal conservative! His evidence is a chart showing that Federal spending as a % of GDP was lower during his Presidency that it was during Clinton's, Daddy B's, or even Reagan's.
FAIL!
Presidents do not inherit a blank slate on spending. They start where the previous administration left off. Here's a graph of Federal spending since 1980:
(click on pic for a more glorious image)As can be seen, under Reagan spending fell by a couple percentage points, under Clinton it fell considerably more, but the Bush train only goes one direction: UP! To the tune of around 2.5 percentage points of GDP!
Paging President Shrub! Phone call for the Shrub!
3 comments:
Actually, it goes in both directions. It goes up for the first couple years, and then wiggles around at the same level.
It goes up for the same reason that it went up in 1990-1991, because of a recession. It fails to go down mostly because the recovery was so weak.
This chart seems to mostly be about the size of the denominator rather than the numerator. President do not inherit a blank slate on spending, but neither is spending cyclical. A lot of government spending is intentionally countercyclical, and those mechanisms were inherited by GWB as well.
The direction of that graph could be predicted entirely in all years by knowing the growth rate of GDP. It's the denominator.
In 2006 the democrats gained control of the House. It looks like the spending climbs in 2007. I suspect that spending is controlled by who is in congress not by the president.
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