The Two Charts President Obama Never Wanted You to See

When President Obama used a risible column by MarketWatch's Rex Nutting to claim to be a deficit hawk, even the Associated Press couldn't keep a straight face.

Of course, Obama, Nutting and the rest of the sycophants avoid the real comparison: actual deficits rung up by each president's policy choices (and those of Congress). In the case of President Obama's first two years in office, Democrat super-majorities in the House and the Senate helped him enact a virtual wish-list of Fabian socialism, from the Stimulus, to multiple attempts to fix the housing market, to "financial reform", to Obamacare.

The real comparison, then, is appropriately illustrated as follows.

Over the past 50 years, 10 U.S. presidents have made annual budget requests to Congress, projecting deficits both big and small. But no other president compares to Barack Obama when it comes to the size and scale of the current budget deficit facing the United States.

The country is facing an 8.3 percent estimated average national deficit of a two-term Obama administration — the biggest of the past 50 years.

As for the Left's claims that President George W. Bush "lied us into wasting an unfathomable amount of money on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan", let's ignore for the moment the so-called lies (we know that both military actions had overwhelming support from both parties). But let's ignore that duplicity for the moment.

In the last decade, how much federal spending actually went to national defense?

A striking chart showing that, over the last decade, 65 percent of federal expenditures went to pay for entitlement commitments, not wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense, or national security:

"About 65 percent of federal expenditures over the last ten years have gone towards entitlements," Paul Miller writes. "By comparison, about 15 percent has gone towards national defense, excluding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq has cost three percent, and only about one percent has gone towards the war in Afghanistan (including the cost of ongoing military operations and all reconstruction and stabilization assistance combined), according to my analysis of figures from OMB."

In other words, Miller says, "Afghanistan is the second-cheapest major war in U.S. history as a percentage of GDP, according to the Congressional Research Service."

Iraq and Afghanistan represent a pittance, a rounding error, for this federal leviathan.

And yet another Democrat myth gets obliterated like the propaganda it is. One day these clowns might actually get something right, though that would require kicking the Marxist-Progressive Fifth Column out of the party.