It's easy to ignore, it's crap from alternet. Yes, that's right, crap. Mindless sludge for the true believer, koolaide in concentrate so strong it should come with a surgeon generals warning.
These guys are a known propaganda mill.
I found this article more humorous than shocking. I wouuld love to see some "right winger" please try to debunk these claims/graphs...
First, there was no link to the data - there is only a graph. They point to a website with budget data but they don't tell you which file they used. Here is the
website, all nicely linked for you. Here is the
Excel file that I downloaded to analyze.
Here is an image of the relevant portion of that file.
1.) They're comparing an 9 year period of growth for Bush with a 4 year period for Obama.
2.) They use Budget Fiscal Years as the basis of the comparison. This means that all of what was going on in any President's first year of office is assumed to be the handiwork of the past President - in a sense then, President Bush's first year in office was really President Clinton's last year. Clearly this isn't true - Presidents shape policies and spending immediately. They cancel programs. They launch new programs.
3.) These morons can't do math. They list that there was an 88% growth in the budget during Bush's term of office. The problem is that in order to get that number then have to calculate the the period in office as nine years, not 8, beginning in 2001 and ending
at the end of 2009. If the period was 2001-2008, then Bush's spending rose by 67% over the spending in place in 2000. If the period runs from 2002 to 2009, meaning Bush is responsible for all of the spending that Barack Obama did in his first complete year of office, then Bush's spending rose by 75% over the spending that took place in 2001, which they would have you believe was not influenced at all by President Bush but was all President Clinton's doing. They're still not up to 88%. What these clowns did was count all 8 years of spending during Bush's terms AND the first year of Obama's spending in order to get to their 88% figure. Check the math yourself.
4.) Obama's spending began in 2009 and runs to 2012. Obama is
projected to increase spending by 25% over 2008 levels by the end of 2012. In comparison during Bush's first 4 years, he increased spending by 28% over spending levels of year 2000. If we are cursed with an 8 year Obama term, his projected spending will rise 50% over the spending levels in place in 2008.
Those are the facts. You can compare Bush's actual spending increase of 67% to Obama's projected spending increases of 50% and you can assign your own value to how much faith to put in the spending projections in this table, because projections are not real spending.
The real story here is 67% versus 50%, not 88% versus 7%.
Only ****ing morons believe anything that comes out of alternet.
I'm not even going to waste my time on the other two charts.
