LETTER: Numbers don’t bear out big spending Obama

To the Telegram:

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the phrase Tax and Spend Democrats. We should be by now, as the Republicans bring it up every election cycle. They’re using the same tired rhetoric again, and it’s still not accurate. This time they’re trying to tell us President Obama has just gone crazy with government spending, when in fact — and trust me here — the Republicans hate the word fact, they also hate the very existence of facts. Lucky for them, they have a really good public relations department, and they’ve found over the years that American voters, because of their collective laziness, will believe almost anything. It doesn’t have to be true, just repeat it loud enough and often enough, and bingo, you now have the new truth — kind of like Newspeak, in the movie 1984, and a lot of people are just too busy or lazy to check for facts. What the heck, I saw it on Fox News, so it’s gotta be true, right?

This time, if we check the numbers we find that this big spending president doesn’t even come close to what the Republicans are telling us. In fact (there’s that word again) when compared with the average annual spending growth over the past 60 years and 10 different administrations (five Republican and five Democrat), this administration has had the lowest annual spending growth rate of them all, 1.4 percent. Eisenhower’s rate was 3.4 percent. The highest was Carter at 13.5 percent, Nixon and LBJ next at 10.4 and 9.2 percent respectively. They spent a lot on Vietnam. G.W. Bush is only at fourth place on the list at 7.7 percent, followed by Reagan 6.8, Kennedy 6.6, G.H.W. Bush 5.4, the big spender Bill Clinton 3.5 percent, Ike and Obama on the bottom of the spending list.

Now, I’m quite sure that President Obama’s spending rate would have been higher had the Republicans passed bills that would have started fixing our crumbling infrastructure, but that would have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and lowered the unemployment rate. It would have been a win-win situation for both Republicans and the Obama administration, and a huge win for our still struggling economy.

That is just not how things work in our politics these days, as the Republicans have a winner-take-all mentality; they’d rather see the president fail, than the country win. They seem to have forgotten they work for us. How sad.

George Richard,

New Richmond, Wis.

Tags: opinion, letters