I appreciate it when democrats give you the rope with which to hang their half baked ideas. Take Mark Fernald for example. Mr. Fernald is a sometime New Hampshire Democrat candidate for this or that, and prominent member of the left wing Granite State Fair Tax Coalition (GSFTC). He recently (sorry, frequently) forwards partisan, left wing economic spin, to justify his pet obsession with rising taxes and class warfare.
This most recent email to the arm chair central planners in his fan base is just another in a string of left wing editorials that attempts to contrast democrat spending against that of our previous president. It is typical Fernald; an oranges to rotten apples comparison that uses incomplete data, wild assumptions (about Obama’s future affect in every case), misleading graphs, cherry picked data, and resulting percentages that stretch the fabric of reality so thin that you could easily pass into the alternate dimension in which Democrats and faeries dance widderershins around the deficit mound, as money appears out of nowhere to pay for whatever theirr tiny, narrow, Marxist minds can imagine.
This particualr faerie story centers around three graphs from the Government Printing Office (GPO). Not the fed, the treasury, or even some fruit-loop left wing think tank, but the GPO. The GPO prints stuff, and answers to the Executive branch. So right out of the toy-box we have to question these partisan stills, presented as they are in a partisan manner, bearing guestimated facts and assumptions, with no basis in reality any greater than anything that has ever escaped Mr. Obama’s teleprompter; you do recall all the Obama the non-partisan, deficit cutting, cost reducing, globe saving, health care giving, unifying, auto company saving, mortgage rescuing, goodness? How about the transparent lobbyist-less, open to ideas, new tone, we need to work together Obama? No? You probably remember the we won, closed door, partisan, hate those bankers, Tea Partiers are terrorists, intimidation tactics, don’t interrupt my vacation, Arrest Ron Paul supporters, dozens of lobbyists, shadow cabinet, Attack Arizona, hunt down my enemies, anti-free speech, black panthers can scare away voters, give guns to Mexican drug lords, nohting is my fault Obama with the double action golf-club grip? Well his printing office is the source. Are we surprised it tries to make him look good?
So what can we glean that goes beyond the objective of showing your Republican friends that they are wrong about Obama? How about using facts to show that those Republicans are actually right?
We know Bush was a big spender who (even without Fernald’s forwarded and misleading graphs) raised the budget from about 2.0 trillion in 2002 to about 3.5 trillion over eight years. The real numbers are close enough, but there is no mention of what we spent it on. There was the cost of recovering from 9/11, a good deal of war spending in there (which both sides agree was too much), and then all kinds of things that should make Fernald look like a raging hypocrite for complaining about it in this context. I mean after all, if spending is good for the economy, WTF* right? (*That’s Win The Future)
Bush spent money growing the size of government. He spent it on plenty of programs only a democrat would love like a massive expansion of medicare, huge increases in education spending, and buckets more on international assistance to Africa for things like AIDS, all things Fernald approves of. And then there was spending Bush did not spend, like that massive 288 billion dollar farm bill/green-energy-love-fest give-away that the Democrat majority congress put together and Bush vetoed which they overrode and spent anyway. And of course TARP, which the left agitated for as part of their campaign rhetoric and fear-mongering of a total economic collapse in the run up to a major election.
So what? Okay, so what. If we just use the numbers we have, GWB only increased the budget by 187 billion every year, over eight years, and left a 407 billion dollar deficit. He had 5% unemployment and slow but steady GDP growth until the housing collapse which we know democrats instigated and hyped to scare people into voting for them and Obama.
So how about Mr. Obama? Mr. Obama is growing government at a pace of 350 Billion per year, has increased 
the budget deficit by more than 1.3 Trillion in just two years, and raised the federal deficit by around two trillion dollars, all before the end of his first term. His last budget, which was rejected by congress, spent even more, and being a good democrat spending is the only solution he has to every problem.
So if we ignore the fantasy Fernald approved graphs that pretend Obama is cutting the deficit and creating jobs, and look at what he has actually done and is still trying to do, we can see where things would go. Staying the course, eight years of Obama will increase irresponsible spending by an additional three trillion, a paltry 200% of the total Bush increase from 2002 to 2008; it will create a budget deficit of 5.2 trillion (compared to GWB’s 407 billion); and raise the national debt by almost ten trillion to a mind numbing 200% of today’s GDP–which under Obama has stagnated at around 1%.
To Ad insult to injury, Mr. Obama spent us into a history defying 2.5 trillion in federally held public debt in just 19 months suggesting that the projected "improvements," in the graphs from the printing office that works for him, are worth as much as all of his other broken promises. Nothing.
But wait! Obama’s spending was necessary. Government spending ‘creates jobs,’ stimulates the economy, in fact the more the merrier.
This is an important point because while the graphs take Bush to task for spending, and the left has drained oceans of ink bitching about it, the article Fernald forwards ends with the suggestion that Obama needs to spend more. It advocates a second stimulus. So what, more spending like Bush perhaps? Given how this is presented, you could make that leap. Bush did it, so can we. And because these are democrats, ten years of negative left wing press about 5% unemployment, irresponsible wars, so-called wage stagnation, and irresponsible Republican spending mean nothing. Obama can have all the irresponsible wars and spending, and food stamp recipients, and Gitmo detainees, and 9% unemployment, and food inflation, and pissed off global allies he wants as long as he gives unions and cronies another trillion dollar hand out. Got it!?
Of course Bush did not spend more, not even close, which is kind of a problem. So I guess this is really just another attempt by the left to misrepresent reality, to sanction mandatory government theft and extortion, and to justify destructive pro-bureaucratic polices that stifle growth, scare job creators, and create dependency and economic ruin.
And he has done just that. So the real question is not what graphs the left can draw up to hide the truth, it is which truth is more likely the real one; is it intentional destruction or sheer incompetence?
What incompetence? Well thanks to Peter Wehner, we have a short list of some of the "benefits" of Obama’s budgetary and economic genius.
* Under Obama’s stewardship, we have lost 2.2 million jobs (and 900,000 full-time jobs in the last four months alone). He is now on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era.
* The unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent v. 7.8 percent the month Obama took office.
* July marked the 30th consecutive month in which the unemployment rate was above the 8 percent level, the highest since the Great Depression.
* Since May 2009 — roughly 14 weeks into the Obama administration — the unemployment rate has been above 10 percent during three months, above 9 percent during 22 months, and above 8 percent during two months.
* Chronic unemployment is worse than during the Great Depression.
* The youth employment rate is at the lowest level since records were first kept in 1948.
* The share of the eligible population holding a job has declined to the lowest level since the early 1980s.
* The housing crisis is worse than in the Great Depression. (Home values are worth roughly one-third less than they were five years ago.)
* The rate of economic growth under Obama has been only slightly higher than the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression. From the first quarter of 2010 through the first quarter of 2011, we experienced five consecutive quarters of slowing growth. America’s GDP for the second quarter of this year was a sickly 1.0 percent; in the first quarter, it was 0.4 percent.
* Fiscal year 2011 will mark the third straight year with deficits in excess of $1 trillion. Prior to the Obama presidency, we had never experienced a deficit in excess of $1 trillion.
* During the Obama presidency, America has increased its debt by $4 trillion.
That is to say, Obama has achieved in two-and-a-half years what it took George W. Bush two full terms in office to achieve — and Obama, when he was running for president, slammed Bush’s record as being “unpatriotic.”
* America saw its credit rating downgraded for the first time in history under the Obama presidency.
* Consumer confidence has plunged to the lowest level since the Carter presidency.
* The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.< /p>
* A record number of Americans now rely on the federal government’s food stamps program. More than 44.5 million Americans received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, a 12 percent increase from one year ago.
No graph can beat the facts on the ground and the jobless and underemployed–they are not voting for these clowns. But Fernald is all in for economic misery which means the GSFTC and the New Hampshire Democrats probably are as well. The Tax and spend party is now the party of sustained economic misery. Someone put it on a poster.
I’ll leave you with this graph. It plots the course of every recession since 1948. – Feel free to look for that stimulus bump. Or how about the housing bail out bump? Or the cash for clunkers bump? Bank reform bump? Obamacare bump? Laser like focus on jobs bump? Or any of the other 40 or so pieces of "job creating" legislation the democrats passed before January 2011? Good luck.
