Eugene has (rightly) given Tim Noah a very hard time for his “Bushisms of the Day.” [UPDATE: My apologies. As Will Baude just pointed out to me by e-mail, it’s Jacob Weisberg who writes that feature.]
But Noah is spot-on in highlighting the grotesque lie in Bush’s Meet the Press appearance:
RUSSERT: But your base conservatives, and listen to Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute, they’re all saying you are the biggest spender in American history.
BUSH: Well, they’re wrong. If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined.
See also: Kash, Kevin Drum, Angry Bear, Kash, Spinsanity, Andrew Sullivan. Spinsanity sorted out where the number came from: the relatively meaningless budget authorization bills passed early in the budgeting process rather than the (always larger) actual budget bills passed later in the process, the bills that actually spend money. Moreover, the numbers exclude defense and homeland security authorizations. So “appropriations bills” and “discretionary spending” are here set equal to “authorization bills” and “non-defense, non-homeland security domestic discretionary spending.” (Just excluding defense isn’t enough to make the last three years look like an era spending restraint; the more-common measure of all domestic discretionary spending shows massive increases.)
Authorization is not spending. A question about whether one is spending a lot of money is not responded to with an answer about how much one said one intended to spend. And “discretionary spending” is not the same as “non-defense, non-homeland discretionary spending.” This isn’t harmless abbreviation. In order to obscure the explosion in spending, the president’s advisors had to come up with an obscure and tortured way to measure what has happened (one that, again, doesn’t measure what actually happened but only what it was said that it was intended to have happen). If you’re going to offer an answer that’s intended to mislead about substance but is technically true, one had better be sure to get the technicalities right. (That is what Bill Clinton excelled at, of course: “There is no sexual relationship.”) Bush’s answer intended to mislead about substance (a strange way of measuring was used for the clear purpose of having a more palatable spending story to tell than is reflected in actual expenditures), and didn’t even manage to be technically true (because ‘discretionary spending’ wasn’t qualified).
Moreover, it seems to me that the technical meaning of “ours have steadily declined” is that the relevant quantity declined, i.e. that budget authorizations fell from one year to the next. The technically-correct deceptive statement would have been that the rate of growth (in this particular measure) has declined– 15% growth was followed, not by cuts, but by 5% growth. Bush didn’t manage to get the technically-correct deception articulated; he simply lied.
But a lot of us know better. A lot of us know that domestic discretionary expenditures have ballooned, and have increased at a much faster rate than they did under Clinton. The figure “up 25%” is sufficiently well-known that Bush’s version of the figures have sparked head-scratching and annoyance. Not many of the people inclined to worry about spending will simply believe Bush’s version of the numbers; we know there’s a trick, and lo and behold there are three. (Authorizations, the definition of discretionary spending, “decline” vs. “decline in the rate of growth.”) The House Republicans who are angry about spending aren’t going to become less so on the basis of this statement. They’re likely to become moreso. The same holds for many of us outside government. If we thought there was a problem before, now we think there’s a problem plus a lie.
UPDATE: See Cato’s page of charts on federal spending, and accompanying commentary. See also Ramesh Ponnuru, who says that the numbers are misleading and that one would have to make “an allowance for looseness in the president’s speech” in order for what was said to match even those misleading numbers.
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