Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics Or Liar, Liar Pants On Fire

A few weeks ago this Presidential administration tried to make us believe that the Obama Presidency was a fiscally prudent operation. The administration failed to mention that the Federal deficit has gone up dramatically since the Democrats took over Congress in 2007 and the White House in 2009, topping one TRILLION dollars a year for the past four years.

The administration failed to mention that Federal government spending as a percentage of GDP has not been this high since probably the second world war since the Democrats took over Congress in 2007 and the White House in 2009.

The administration failed to mention that while spending and deficits started rising dramatically in the last two years of the Bush administration, those outlandishly wasteful budgets were developed and passed by a Democratically controlled Congress, that then Senator Barack Obama did not raise any objections to those budget busting deficit spending levels, or that the President had not worked to bring those high deficits and spending levels down once he was in the White House.

The administration failed to mention how they contorted, manipulated, and otherwise deceived when they tried to foist this ridiculous notion on the public, the notion that this administration is in any way frugal with taxpayer wealth.

The administration failed to mention that they continue to allow hundreds of billinos of taxpayer dollars a year to be wasted and lost to incompetence and criminal fraud.

I could go on and on about the deception they tried to pull off, but pictures are much better than words in this situation. Many of the following graphs have already appeared int his blog but as long as the likes of Pelosi, Reid, and the President continually insist on a different reality than what actually happened, I will continue to bring up the graphs.

The first four graphs cover the following spending trends and use only official government data sources as their basis. No Republican, Tea Party, or other partisan source of data was used, just official U.S. government data:

• Federal government spending deficits - Billions Of Dollars
• Federal government spending deficits - Budget Deficits as a Percentage of GDP
• Federal government spending deficits - Government Spending As a Percentage Of GDP
• Federal government spending deficits - Billions of Dollars (with a horizontal line showing the October, 2011 MONTHLY Obama administration deficit)

A number of consistent observations can be drawn across all of the graphs:

1. Spending was generally under control and getting better until the Democrats took of control of Congress in January, 2007.
2. This good spending trend starts to deteriorate in 2008, the first year that Democrats Pelosi and Reid got their hands and their control on the nation's budget making process in a Congress that seats Senator Obama and a Democratic majority.
3. Things really start to get worse in 2009, Obama's first year in office and three and a half years later, he has done nothing to get  wasteful spending under control, as the graphs indicate.
4. Spending is so far out of control, the fourth graph shows that the Obama administration had a single MONTH of budget deficits, around two hundred billion dollars, that was larger than several of the ANNUAL budget deficits the Bush administration ran.

Thus, the pure simplicity and message from these government data sources show that even if Obama was not President when the uptick in government spending began, his Democratic colleagues in Congress, where the country's budgets are developed, are certainly to blame for the explosion in spending, he did not oppose this explosion in spending when he served in that Congress and he obviously did nothing to get that explosion of spending under control in his first three and a half years in the White House.

Note: you can double click on each graph to get a bigger view:

But wait, I can hear the Obama supporters and enablers crying out that the war in Iraq is to blame for the massive budget deficits and the President is not to blame for Bush's war folly. I thought about that and concluded, based on the following graphs that this argument does not hold water. There is no doubt the war in Iraq was one of the biggest Presidential mistakes in our history, wasting blood, time, national unity, and taxpayer wealth.

However, as the following graphs show, Iraq does not come close to  being the sole or even major blame for our skyrocketing deficits and government spending. The following graphs come from the outstanding work being done by the Cato Institute and their effort, "Downsizing Government."

Cato has been working on this effort for a little while, where they have gone through EVERY single Federal department looking for ways to cut unnecessary government spending, reductions that will save the American taxpayer a lot of wealth without substantially affecting the average American's life. Their outstanding analyses, rationales, and identification of the TRILLIONS of dollars that can be taken out of our government's budget can be found at www.downsizinggovernment.org.

The following graphs from Cato show the total annual budget numbers for the major Federal government Cabinet positions over time. Remembering that the Democrats took over Congress in 2007 and Obama moved into the White House in 2009, answer the following questions that the graphs suggest:

• If the Iraq war is to blame for our high deficits, why did the budget of the Department of Agriculture go up by more than 50% since Bush's last year in office and is still trending up?
• If the Iraq war is to blame for our high deficits, why did the budget for the Commerce Department go up by more than 50% since Bush's last year in office?
• If the Iraq war is to blame for our high deficits, why did the budget for the Labor Department more than double since Bush's last year in office?
• If the Iraq war is to blame for our high deficits, why did the budget for the Transportation Department go up about 20% since Bush's last year in office and is still trending up?
• If the Iraq war is to blame for our high deficits, why did the budget for the Energy Department go up almost 100% since Bush's last year in office and is still trending up?
• If the Iraq war is to blame for our high deficits, why is the budget for the rest of the major government entities graphed below at or higher than Bush's last year in office?

Look, I am not defending Bush. But his administration looks almost miserly compared to what Pelosi, Reid, and Obama have done to government spending over the past five and a half years, in both the aggregate spending level and the department by department spending levels. The graphs above show that the notion that Obama, and his fellow Democrats, have any degree of budget sanity and ability is insane.

I take it as a personal insult that Obama would even try to convince us that he has the budget under control and the deficits are not his fault. This attempt at justifying his bad handling of the budget process and the resulting massive deficits and debt is a disgrace and a fallacy of epic proportions.

Since Obama and the Democrats took over Washington, they have increased the national debt by about one third in just a few years, adding an amazing $5 TRILLION to the national debt. More debt has been added to the national debt than all of the Presidential administrations from Washington through Clinton. The $5 TRILLION additional debt works out to a debt burden of about $43,000 per each American household.

Without going into the convoluted way he tried to pull off this charade, consider the following simple business illustrative example:

• Let's assume that you run a small business and your regular monthly expenses are $100 a month.
• Forces beyond your control result in your monthly expenses going to $200 a month. In this case, your monthly expenses have increased 100%.
• But if your business had regular monthly expenses of $1,000 and forces beyond your control resulted in your monthly expenses going to $1,500 a month, you would have only a 50% increase.
• But although your monthly increase in expenses in the second example is only half of what it was in the first example, 50% vs. 100%, the ACTUAL size of your monthly expenses is five times as much, $500 vs. $100.

This is what Obama tried to do with this notion that he has not increased spending by very much. By deceptively manipulating numbers and dealing with percentages and not actual spending, he got to the false answer he wanted. But dealing with percentages, as the above example shows, can mask the reality of the situation, i.e. the percentages can be smaller but the actual dollars involved can be much larger and much more dangerous.

An insult and misuse and abuse of reality and statistics. As a trained statistician, I resent his manipulation. As an American, I resent his outrageous spending and waste that destroys our country's fiscal health and our democracy's liberties and freedoms.

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Note: just so we are clear who was in charge and who is to blame for our dangerously rising national debt, the following chart shows that the Democrats have controlled about 80% of the Federal government since they took over Congress in 2007 (double click on the graph for a larger view):