Figures don't lie, but...

... if you torture data enough it will tell you anything.

The American Spectator : AmSpecBlog : More Zombies

Paul Krugman writes: "...I see that John Taylor is peddling the zombie claim that there has been a huge expansion in the federal government under Obama."

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Krugman is right that automatic stabilizers and Medicaid have been the biggest drivers of the increase in spending so far. But the story is a little different when you look at those same numbers in absolute terms instead of growth rates (CBO data, in 2010 dollars)

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As you can see, "everything else" is a much bigger category in absolute terms than one might guess from looking at Krugman's graph.

But there's still a weird element to this graph: the x-axis categories, again. Krugman includes two full years of the Bush administration (2007-2008) as Obama years. He explains that he used those divisions because 2007 was the last pre-recession year, and the recession has changed the size and composition of government outlays. The recession led to an increase in automatic stabilizer spending under Bush, too. In order to get a more direct comparison of Bush vs. Obama, I generated a graph illustrating Bush's last two years vs. Obama's first two

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By the growth of "everything else" in this graph, it looks like there has indeed been a "huge expansion" of the federal government under Obama, including both automatic stabilizers and everything else.

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But the suggestion that Obama hasn't expanded the government at all, or the claim that "[t]he "Obama spending binge" was almost entirely mythical" (a claim Jonathan Chait makes based on Krugman's post), is likely to lead readers away from the truth.