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Alternative accounting, different Obama tally

Thomas Boyd Lyme

Publication: The Day

Published 07/25/2012 12:00 AM

Updated 07/24/2012 05:15 PM

The research used to write your July 23 editorial, "Obama the frugal," needs to be updated. The Wall Street Journal on-line article to which you referred was written by Rex Nutting on May 22, 2012. The very next day James Taranto refuted Mr. Nutting in that same forum in an article titled "Obama's Permanent Emergency. How to disguise a spending binge."
He pointed out that the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), passed under the outgoing Bush administration, and accounted for much of the enormous spending (17.9 percent) increase in the 2009 fiscal year budget. TARP, however, was a temporary program. Mr. Nutting accepts this higher 2009 budget level as the new base from which to calculate the beginning of the Obama spending. If these new temporary dollars were subtracted from the accounting during the subsequent years, the results would show the Obama administration's record-setting spending spree.