Mike Konczal explains why these statistics don't make Obama a big spender:
Federal government spending as a percentage of GDP went from 20.8% in 2008 to 25.2% in 2009. How much was GDP falling? If GDP had grown 3.4% as it had done the year before, instead of dropping 2.7%, spending as a percentage of GDP would have gone to 23.7%. That means a third of the rise in government spending as a percentage of GDP is a mechanical effect of GDP falling in the Great Recession. And if GDP didn't fall in the Great Recession, automatic stabilizers wouldn't have kicked in and there wouldn't have been the stimulus bill, meaning less spending.
Dan Mitchell says that Nutting did not account for inflation. When you do that, the rate of spending increases under Obama go from 1.4 percent to … 1.8 percent (compared with Bush's 5 percent, with nothing like the Great Recession to deal with). If you take interest payments out of the picture (since a president cannot be blamed for interest on a debt he inherited), Obama actually comes out as the most frugal president since LBJ, including Clinton and Bush 41. Obama's record, to be sure, is made much better by counting TARP as Bush's legacy. Which it was. But if you regard a bank bailout as inevitable under any president, Obama comes out with less bloom on the rose. But it seems to me that if you exclude TARP for Bush, you should exclude all the stabilizers in place for the recession no one disputes Obama inherited.
It's worth remembering that all this was in response to Mitt Romney's claim that "since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history."
By any measure, including those made by the sharpest critics of Nutting's analysis, that is false. After a big jump, in 2008 – 2009, the spending has been modest, as Krugman constantly complains about.
The Dish 