WSJ: Obama Spending Highest Since World War II

Wall Street Journal

President Obama has now tried to remake himself into some sort of fiscal conservative. It's a step in the right direction: at least he acknowledges that in order for him to win he's going to have to convince enough suckers to believe he's bringing down spending. In other words, Republicans have a winning message. Thank you, Tea Party.

So perhaps they'd best keep away the latest piece in the Wall Street Journal from the suckers. In today's piece, Stephen Moore and Art Laffer track the spending that began going into hyperspace when


Nancy Pelosi took the gavel and Obama gets into power. Bush isn't spared, either. He could have vetoed some of the spending to make a point, but didn't.

Here are a couple of excerpts from their piece here:
 

The numbers are mind boggling. From the second quarter of 2007, i.e., the first full quarter of a Pelosi-Reid dominated Congress and a politically weakened President Bush, to the second quarter of 2009 when President Obama assumed office, government spending skyrocketed to 27.3% of GDP from 21.4%. It was the largest peacetime expansion of government spending in U.S. history. 

After taking office in 2009, with spending and debt already at record high levels and the deficit headed to $1 trillion, President Obama proceeded to pass his own $830 billion stimulus, auto bailouts, mortgage relief plans, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms and the $1.7 trillion ObamaCare entitlement (which isn't even accounted for in the chart).

Listen to Stephen Moore talk about the reasons why spending dipped in 2010.