Pelosi’s office responsible for massive lie in defending the indefensable

Via Hot Air: Politifact, WaPo: No, Obama is the “undisputed debt king”

Earlier this week I got a couple of e-mails about a chart du jour attempting to argue that Barack Obama increased the debt the least among the last five Presidents, and wanted to get a response from me. Frankly, the argument seemed so absurd after Obama’s three massive budget deficits and his failed Porkulus spending that I assumed the chart came from a fringe lefty desperate for a defense of Obama. As it turns out, I was right, in a way — it came from Nancy Pelosi’s office. Here’s the chart:

Right off the bat, one can see a basic problem in this chart, which is that we’re comparing apples and oranges. Reagan, Clinton, and Bush 43 all served for eight years, while Obama had barely cleared two years by the time this chart’s data was published in May 2011. Even if this was accurately depicting the data, it would still be a misleading graphic comparison.

As two different fact-checkers have found, though, it doesn’t accurately depict the data. Politifact gives Pelosi and her allies a “Pants On Fire” rating for pushing this chart as reality…

Let’s not forget that the Democrats kept Bush out of the loop on the 2009 budget, too, by passing continuing resolutions until Obama took office. He signed the massive omnibus bill passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress in March 2009 to finish that budget. And who ran the House of Representatives at that time, and for the last two years of the Bush presidency? Why, none other than Nancy Pelosi, that’s who.

Politifact then points out that deficits as a percentage of GDP is actually the better measurement, and recalculates the debt on those terms. Guess who winds up the winner?

Reagan: Up 14.9 percentage points
George H.W. Bush: Up 7.1 percentage points
Clinton: Down 13.4 percentage points
George W. Bush: Up 5.6 percentage points
Obama: Up 21.9 percentage points (through December 2010 only)

Politifact isn’t the only media fact-checker working on this chart. Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post gave Pelosi four Pinocchios, even for her amended chart:

If the chart actually used public debt rather than gross debt, it would have put Obama and George W. Bush virtually in the same league — 60 percent increase (as of September 2011) for Obama versus 70 percent for Bush — even though Bush served as president much longer.

But the biggest problem is that this is just dumb math. What really counts is not the raw debt numbers, but the size of the debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product. The GDP is the broadest measure of the national economy and directly indicates the nation’s ability to service its debts. In fact, the White House budget office historical tables portray much of the data as a percentage of GDP, because that is the best way to truly compare such numbers over time.

If the chart were recast to show how much the debt went up as a percentage of GDP, it would look pretty bad for Obama after not even three years in office. In fact, Obama does almost twice as poorly as Reagan — and four times worse than George W. Bush.

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