Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Budgetary shenanigans


Noticed (via Greg Mankiw) this post, which purports to show the massive increase in Federal Government spending over the years of the Obama Administration. It's wrong...or rather, it doesn't graph the right thing. What matters (somewhat obviously) is non-defense discretionary spending...not the BEA number which includes all entitlements. Now if the author's point is that Obama should have immediately cut SS, Medicare, etc. magically during the 2 years that the Democrats controlled the Congress, than that might be the right picture. If you care about the policies of the Obama Administration's impact on the economy, you can see it right here.