Obama's spending is the problem?

[Igel]

4. Don't understand the chart.

Revenue is about where it was in 2007.

Deficit is 3-4x larger than it was in 2007.

At 1.8% average for the four years past--which includes the fiscal year 2013 apparently just past--we get an increase of around 8%. But with a deficit increase of about $900 billion, you have to wonder how that works. Is $900 billion really 8% of the budget?

So:
1. F/y 2013 isn't over. They're using the projected budget amounts for 2013. For 2012 as well, for all I know. That number's already been blown out of the water.

2. They're almost certainly ignoring non-discretionary spending. Yet most of the spending is non-discretionary. That makes the title of the chart disingenuous. It should say "annualized growth of federal discretionary spending."

3. I can't rule out that they've included the stimulus as "baseline" for Obama's first year somehow and only measured the increase of the discretionary spending from the first term to the last term. If this is the case, then a big jump at the start of a term--say, of $800 billion--just happens and a large increase in spending gets assigned nobody. If they didn't include the stimulus as baseline, good. But then I have no idea what it means for the purpose of this chart to explicitly assign the 2009 stimulus to Obama but 2009 to Bush, and then run Obama's numbers only from the start of 2010 to presumably the end of 2013. (Note that 8% increase on top of Bush II's budget + Stimulus II comes close to the deficit. I suspect this is a coincidence, though.)

4. I don't know how they included TARP repayments. It's a budget item and the money was repaid and credited in the year it was repaid. It's all discretionary. (When I did bookkeeping I tried to back out those kinds of repayments because otherwise it skewed the books.)

5. There's no "peace dividend" for Iraq. In 2008 we knew the war would be ending, unless Obama couldn't continue it. He couldn't.

6. The last point is petty. A bunch of the baseline budget increase for f/y 2009, assigned to *, was never approved by *. A large spending bill that he refused to sign languished until the next president, who said he'd sign it and quickly did.

I keep telling my kids in high school that if you have numbers and formulas and have no idea what assumptions went into them you have no idea what good they are and how to use them. I explain the assumptions and they ignore me. I then give them problems to do and they screw them up because they ignored me. "But I used the formula!" Eh.