Running Up the Tab

President Obama has lately been claiming the mantle of a fiscal conservative when it comes to spending, claiming that federal spending under his watch has slowed to rates unseen since the Eisenhower Administration.  Ed Morrissey at Hot Air takes a closer look at the numbers and finds these claims to be just a little short of the truth:

The last fully Republican budget was FY2007, which came in at $2.77 trillion.  The last Bush/Democrat budget was FY2008, which was $2.982 trillion.  The FY2009 budget, which Obama signed into law and which was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress, was $3.517 trillion with a $1.4 trillion deficit.  That’s a year-on-year increase of nearly 18%, and those numbers come straight from the White House website.  If you prefer the figures in percentage of GDP, as Kessler noted yesterday, we went from 20.8% of GDP in FY2008 to 25.2% in FY2009, which is an increase of 22% year on year.

Nor does it get any better.  Using FY2008 as the baseline comparison, FY2010′s budget was $3.456 trillion, an increase of 15.88% over the last Bush/Democrat budget.  FY2011′s $3.603 trillion budget was a 20.8% increase, and FY2012′s projected $3.795 trillion (the White House projection, mind you) is an increase of 27.26% over the last Bush budget — in just four budget years.  An argument that this is a demonstration of fiscal discipline would have to come straight out of the pages of George Orwell’s 1984.