Garbage Statistics

At least this gives us bacon

Why is it that so many individuals try to put lipstick on a turd?  Here is an article by a Forbes columnist saying that Obama is the smallest spending president since the end of the 70s. Why this was written is beyond me.  This segment alone floors me

"So, how have the Republicans managed to persuade Americans to buy into the whole “Obama as big spender” narrative?
It might have something to do with the first year of the Obama presidency where the federal budget increased a whopping 17.9% —going from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. I’ll bet you think that this is the result of the Obama sponsored stimulus plan that is so frequently vilified by the conservatives…but you would be wrong."

Here's the thing that needs to be reiterated, but I cannot understand why this is so.  When it comes to debt it doesn't matter that if Obama has slowed his spending ways since his stimulus, the fact is that he passed the stimulus.  He increased spending by nearly 18%, and why would we credit the president for not spending as much during later years?  I mean is it such a stretch of the imagination to think; that perhaps the only reason why he has slowed his increasing in spending was because a significant segment of the populace sent his fellow democrats packing?  Does anybody in America truly believe, and I mean deep down inside themselves, that if Obama got a green light to increase spending by another 18%,  that he wouldn't do it?

But lets get all statistical to blow this out of the water.  What really matters is if GDP growth is growing faster than debt.  Looking at this chart, compiled by using data from the Department of Treasury and the Bureau of Labor and Statistics,  we see that since 2000, and probably Lyndon B Johnson's presidency, GDP growth has not outpaced the growth of Federal spending.  But lets further eviscerate the authors line of argument, by looking at the little green bars, and please forgive the sloppiness of the chart as I threw this together during a coffee break, we see that the difference between the growth of debt and GDP growth has not been below 10% during Obamas presidency. 

To summarize, for every way you can find to try and make our current situation look better, or somehow make our president a model of fiscal responsibility; others like me will find many more that show those assertions to be nothing more than the desperate lies that they are. And it only took a coffee break.