On his congressional website, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., makes a striking
claim that President Obama has doubled the size of goverment.
Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, is perhaps the
leading Republican voice for a fiscally conservative approach to taxing,
spending and reducing the federal debt.
So when a reader recently pointed out the doubling-government claim on a
web page devoted to Ryan’s views on tax policy, we thought it was worth a look.
Here’s an excerpt from the Web page:
"At a time when Wisconsinites are facing economic uncertainty, a high
unemployment rate and a rise in the costs of living, the last thing our
country needs are tax increases. President Obama, however, has proposed
$1.6 trillion in new taxes on families, small businesses and job
creators and tripling the debt since he was elected. At the same time,
the president has doubled the size of government since he took office.
Instead of chasing higher spending with ever-higher taxes, Congress
needs to make our tax code fair, competitive and simple. Unfortunately,
our current tax system fails on these three elements."
Further down the page, Ryan adds a bit more detail about his doubling-government claim.
"Strong leadership is needed in the White House, but despite repeated
acknowledgments of the gravity of the federal government’s fiscal
outlook, the president seems to have ignored the warnings of his own
experts and punted on the (fiscal year) 2012 budget. The budget proposal
he submitted to Congress last year continues down the same
unsustainable path: doubling the size of government since the President
took office, imposing $1.6 trillion in new taxes on families, small
businesses and job creators and tripling the debt since the President
was elected. This crushing burden of debt is holding back economic
growth. President Obama’s budget was defeated by a vote of 0 to 97 in
the Senate. We have tried to borrow, spend,and tax our way to
prosperity, and it hasn’t worked. The President is expected to put
forward his budget proposal for (fiscal year) 2013 in the near future. I
remain hopeful that he will work with Congress to address these
important challenges facing our country."
According to the second passage above, Ryan is referring to Obama’s
fiscal year 2012 budget proposal -- the one released in early 2011,
rather than the current one, which was released in early 2012. So we’ll
focus on Obama’s fiscal year 2012 proposal.
We didn’t hear back from Ryan’s office, but we think the most obvious
way to interpret his statement is by measuring the size of federal
outlays -- that is, the money spent by the federal government. Ryan is,
after all, talking about budget figures.
First, let’s look at the amount of federal outlays when Obama "took office."
According to the Office of Management and Budget, federal outlays for fiscal year 2009 -- the fiscal year that was underway when Obama was inaugurated -- totaled $3.5 trillion.
To look at federal outlays for subsequent years, we turned to an
analysis by the Congressional Budget Office,
the nonpartisan number-crunching arm of Congress. The numbers are
broadly similar to OMB’s, but since CBO is an independent agency, rather
than part of the Obama administration, budget experts suggested that we
use CBO’s numbers instead.
CBO concluded that by fiscal year 2012 -- the current fiscal year --
the president’s budget proposal would increase federal outlays to $3.7
trillion. That’s a 6 percent increase -- a far cry from doubling.
If you take a longer time horizon, the outlays come closer to doubling,
but still not close. By fiscal year 2021 -- the final year for which
CBO provided its analysis and long after Obama will have left office --
federal outlays would reach $5.8 trillion. That’s an increase of 66
percent, which is still not double.
However, even if that figure truly represented a doubling, using the
2021 figure is misleading. When Ryan said that Obama "has doubled the
size of government since he took office," it sounds like he’s saying
Obama has already doubled the size of government -- not that his
spending blueprint will lead to doubled federal outlays at a point five
years after Obama’s theoretical second term in office will have come to
an end.
"I think it is pretty clear" that Ryan’s claim "in a straight budget
sense is false, because it implies it has already happened," said Steve
Ellis, the vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Just to be sure, we also looked at the figures for federal outlays as a
percentage of gross domestic product. These numbers actually decline
from 25.0 percent in fiscal 2009 to 23.6 percent in fiscal 2012, and
then moves within a narrow range, ending up at 24.2 percent in fiscal
2021. No doubling here, either.
Finally, there’s the question of whether Obama would be to blame even
if the doubling claim was true. Roy T. Meyers, a political scientist at
the University of Maryland-Baltimore County who specializes in budget
issues, is skeptical
"Were all the increased outlays because of Obama's actions? Of course
not," Meyers said. "Many of them were the result of ‘mandatory’ policies
in place before he took office, and those policies responded to
unfavorable economic conditions -- deposit insurance, food stamps,
Medicaid, unemployment insurance and so on."
Indeed, discretionary spending -- the line items that Obama had the
most control over when he assembled his budget -- represented between 25
and 40 percent of federal outlays during most of the 10 year period
that CBO studied. The rest -- a clear majority -- consists of mandatory
spending and net interest on the federal debt.
Finally, while we doubted this is what Ryan meant, we also looked at
whether the number of federal employees had doubled under Obama. Federal
employment has never risen by more than 10 percent above its January
2009 level, excluding temporary Census jobs, according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics. And there is no reliable statistical way to measure
changes in the federal government's regulatory burden, said Stan
Collender, a former staff member of the House and Senate Budget
Committees, who is a partner at Qorvis, a public relations firm.
Our ruling
Even Ryan’s out-of-date budget data offers no support for the notion
that Obama "has doubled the size of government since he took office."
As the House's budget leader and a key spokesman for his party’s
budgetary proposals, Ryan should have known better. We rate his
statement Pants on Fire.
UPDATE: After our story appeared, Ryan’s office
got back to us. They said that they had been using fiscal year 2008 as
their base year, rather than fiscal year 2009. Using the 2008 figures,
federal outlays do roughly double between 2008 and 2021 under Obama’s
fiscal year 2012 budget proposal. However, we think it’s inaccurate to
use fiscal 2008 as the base year, since that year ended about four
months before Obama took office. In any case, our previous concerns --
using figures for 2021, when Obama will have been out of office for
either five or nine years, and ignoring the role of mandatory spending
in expanding federal outlays -- still stand, and we’re keeping the
rating at Pants on Fire. In addition, Ryan’s office removed the sentence
we checked after our story appeared. It has been replaced by a sentence
that reads, "At the same time, the president will double the national
debt and his plan ensures it will triple in the next eight years."
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