President Obama has called House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s, R-Wis., budget “thinly veiled social Darwinism” that is “antithetical to our entire history.” “I am not exaggerating,” Obama continued, “These are facts.”
So let’s look at the facts.
According to the Historical Tables produced by the White House Office of Management and Budget, spending as a percentage of gross domestic product under President Clinton (1993-2000) averaged 19.8 percent and never went above 21.4 percent in 1993. Under President Bush (2001-2008) it averaged 19.6 percent and never went above 20.8 percent. In fact, since demobilization after World War II (1947-2011), spending as a percentage of gdp has averaged 19.7 percent and reached a record 25.2 percent in 2009.
Those are the facts about our federal government’s spending history. Now lets compare the Obama and Ryan budgets going forward as scored by the Congressional Budget Office. As the chart above shows, under the Obama budget, federal spending stays far above the post-WWII 19.7 percent average, never falling below 22 percent, and sloping upwards sharply at the end of the ten year window.
By contrast, the Ryan budget cuts spending from 23.4 percent in 2012 to a low of 19.3 percent in 2018, before rising to 19.8 percent in 2022. Over a 10-year span, federal spending as a percentage of gdp averages 20 percent under Ryan’s plan. That it is higher than the post-WWII historical average.
