Data is from FRED. The series I used to construct the above charts were Population (POP), Consumer Price Index (USACPIALLMINMEI), Federal Government: Current Expenditures (FGEXPND), State & Local Government Current Expenditures (SLEXPND).
The impetus for these graphs was this -I was out last night with some friends and one mentioned that he thought President Obama was a socialist. I said I thought he was slightly left of center. Which I then followed up with the claim that I bet that real government expenditures (including federal state and local) per capita had actually fallen over his administration. It turns out that I was not quite correct about that - however what was true was that the growth rate of real government expenditures per capita has been very low under President Obama.
Today this article came up on Google News. (Note to self - you are supposed to be ignoring Forbes!). It appears that MarketWatch did a similar study and their numbers are a bit different (below). Why the difference? First they are just looking at federal spending while I included federal, state, and local in my comparison. Second they start with year two of a president's term because the spending in his first year is predominantly set by decisions of the previous administration. Their method may be better than mine at attributing to the president what they had direct control over. But either way we come up with the same general conclusion - our current "socialist" president has presided over one of the smallest rates of growth in government in recent times. Perhaps the Socialist International will be forced to revoke his membership now.
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