President Barack Obama’s new budget proposes to spend $3.78 trillion in 2014, which would be 27 percent higher than spending in 2008. President Obama believes in expansive government, and he is proposing a range of new programs, including subsidies for infrastructure, preschool, and mental health care.
However, total federal outlays increased substantially faster under President George W. Bush than they have under Obama so far. It is true that Obama’s spending ambitions have been restrained by House Republicans. But looking at the raw data, it appears that the last Republican president was more profligate than the current Democratic one.
The figure shows total federal outlays, but the data is adjusted to exclude the TARP bailout amounts for all years. The Congressional Budget Office now says (page 15) that TARP will end up costing taxpayers just $22 billion overall. Yet the official federal outlay figure for 2009 included $151 billion in estimated TARP costs. That number has since been re-estimated and mainly reversed out of later-year spending totals. Therefore, TARP must be removed from federal spending totals to avoid a distorted picture of budget growth.
The figure indicates that spending jumped from $1.86 trillion in 2001 to $2.98 trillion in 2008. That’s a 60 percent jump in seven years under Bush, which works out to an annual average growth rate of 7.0 percent. (All data cited here are for fiscal years).
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