.... you're starting from 2008 even though our budget was still operating under the continuing resolution signed by Bush for the first half of FY2009;
President Bush in February, 2008 proposed a budget with just a 3% spending increase over the prior year. Fiscal year 2009 ran from October 1, 2008 until September 30, 2009. President Obama’s term began on January 20, 2009.
Recall, however, that in 2008 Congress was controlled by Democrat majorities, with
Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, and the restless
Senator Obama already running for President, just four years removed from his glorious career as a
state Senator in the Illinois legislature. As Hans Bader reported on May 26 for the
Washington Examiner, the budget
approved and implemented by Pelosi, Obama and the rest of the Congressional Democrat majorities provided for a
17.9 percent increase in spending for fiscal 2009!
Actually, President Obama and the Democrats were even more deeply involved in the fiscal 2009 spending explosion than that. As Bader also reports, “The Democrat Congress [in 2008], confident Obama was going to win in 2008, passed only three of fiscal 2009’s 12 appropriations bills (Defense, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Homeland
Security). The Democrat Congress passed the rest of them [in 2009], and [President] Obama signed them.” So Obama played a very direct role in the runaway fiscal 2009 spending explosion.
