Obama Is The Most Fiscally Responsible President In a Generation

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Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 02:37 pm

Obama is slowing the growth in spending better than any other President in 60 years! The growth in the federal budget has grown 1.4% in President Obama’s first term, compared to President Reagan who increased the rate of spending by 8% in his first term.

In fact in fiscal year 2010, Obama’s first budget, the growth fell, 1.8%. If President Obama wasn’t facing the Bush era financial collapse, the outcome would be even better.

In fact let’s take the recession factor out of the Obama budgets, and see where that leads us.

In 2010, the federal budget increased unemployment insurance by 58%. If we take out the recession factor, it would have only increased by 2%, taking into consideration historical budgets. The same is true for Medicaid.

The baseline we are using is the 2009 budget which was passed in October of 2008 under George Bush. Unemployment insurance was about $360 billion and Medicaid was $224 billion. This is just in line with historical increases of about 2%.

So, in Obama’s budget for 2010, rather than $571 billion dollars, it would have only been $367 billion. ($360 billion + 2% = 367 billion)

That is already a $204 billion dollar savings! If we add on Medicaid, the 2010 budget for that was $290 billion. If we take out the recession, it would have only been about $230 billion, a savings of $60 billion. ($224 billion +2% = 230 billion)

Actually if we took out the entire stimulus package of $900 billion growth in spending would have DROPPED more than 2%, something that hasn’t happened in generations.

My point here is that President Obama is not a spending obsessed socialist, in fact contrary to what conservatives believe, he is very responsible. A drop in growth of 1.8% in 2010 during the height of crisis is pretty significant.

President Obama is turning out to be a very tight walleted leader, and more fiscally responsible, than George W Bush and Reagan, both of whom saw growth in federal spending of 7- 8% in their terms.