I saw this referred to on Facebook and had to make an account here to point out a fallacy I noticed.

I love that you used the Mises institute as a reference, but to very selectively choose data in order to strengthen your argument is misleading at best. This combined with the Andrew Sullivan quote lead the reader to believe that the Federal Gov’t under President Obama’s tenure has reduced spending. And in a slanted, very technical way you are indeed correct. *Technically* the budget decreased 1.8% from 2009-2010. On the other hand the Fed. Budget of 2008, the last year of Bush’s tenure PRE-CRISIS, was $500+ Billion below that of 2009. That shows an increase of almost 20% from 2008-2009.

So yes, he negligibly reduced an already incredibly obnoxious CRISIS budget in his first year, and then proceeded to build on it as a baseline. We all already know Bush sucked, but then we’re talking about Obama here, not Bush. He is nowhere near a communist, but to seek to invalidate legitimate grievances such as his administrations reckless spending is so not cool.

One last point: I looked up labor data on the U.S. Census website and found that Government employment actually increased between the Bushy Year of 2004 and Obama Years of ‘10-11. Major decreases in government employment occurred almost exclusively in the 90s under Clinton when he gutted the Department of Defense by nearly 500,000 employees.