A failure of government spending

One of the Republican’s most successful false flag campaigns has been in promoting the notion that President Obama has presided over an explosion of government spending. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. This chart showing combined levels of government purchases of goods and services for the last ten years tells the real story:

Note this doesn’t include legacy spending that’s mandated like Social Security and Medicare. But what this means is, as Dr. Krugman points out:

Obama, far from presiding over a huge expansion of government the way the right claims, has in fact presided over unprecedented austerity, largely driven by cuts at the state and local level. And it’s therefore an amazing triumph of misinformation the way that lackluster economic performance has been interpreted as a failure of government spending.

This isn’t complicated folks. Obama’s policies haven’t failed. They were never given a chance to work. His attempts to stimulate the economy were obstructed at every turn by Republicans hellbent on sabotaging our country’s economic recovery with brutal austerity measures. It’s a miracle our economy has recovered as much as it has and we would be in a lot better shape right now if everyone had ignored the GOP’s ill-informed deficit demagoguery and listened to the stimulus hawks in the first place.