President Barack Obama said: “Since I’ve been president, federal spending has risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years.” And then he said, “Think about that.
I went to the White House website to see what sort of historical light the data published by Obama’s Office of Management and Budget would shine on his fiscal record.
The data says this: Since fiscal 1930, the earliest year for which the government has made official calculation, only two presidents have spent 24 percent or more of GDP for three or more straight fiscal years that started while they were president. They are Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Obama.
The difference is this: FDR spent more than 24 percent of GDP in fiscal 1942, 1943, 1944 and 1945 — because the United States was fighting World War II.
Before World War II — during the Great Depression — FDR never spent more than 12 percent of GDP. That is less than half of what Obama has spent in each of the three fiscal years that have started during his presidency.
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