Rick Unger, the perfect example of ignorance

There was this photo people were sharing on Facebook about an opinion Rick Unger wrote in Forbes about how Obama is the president who has increased government spending the least since Eisenhower.  Total Bull Shit and millions of ignorant morons all over the nation, if not the world, believe this tripe.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/05/24/who-is-the-smallest-government-spender-since-eisenhower-would-you-believe-its-barack-obama/

Education is always the key.  If someone gives you a fact, check it yourself, otherwise you are an ignorant robot.

This article is really stupid since we need to compare Budget Spending to the Gross Domestic Product and the Tax Receipts Collected to be incontext, but, for this blog we will just address the ignorance of the writer, Rick Unger and his ignorant followers.

This article is a pretty good trick since there isn't any real solid budget data on anything after 2011.  Everything after 2011 is estimated.  Lets look at 2009, 2010 and 2011.  The only real data that exists.  And lets look at Obama's ability to predict spending.  We will use two documents;

Why are we using 2009?

Because during Fiscal 2009 the Obama administration passed some really huge, off budget spending bills.

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BUDGET-2009-TAB/xls/BUDGET-2009-TAB-3-1.xls
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BUDGET-2013-TAB/xls/BUDGET-2013-TAB-1-1.xls

These are documents that give us the most basic budget information.

First, lets look at the 2013 budget with hard data from 2009, 2010 and 2011.

(I have now checked the 2014 budget which includes hard data from 2012, the spending prediction increase was off, 2009 prediction for 2012 was 1.6% over 2011, 2011 prediction for 2012 was -2.06 and the 2013 prediction for 2012 spending was 5.34%, how are those for a range of predictions.  Actual was -1.75%.  Unger's reliance on Obama admin prediction accuracy is ridiculous)

In cell K8 write a formula that calculates the increase in spending over the previous year.  Make up your own formula it really doesn't matter what formula you use.

I use a little bit different of a formula, K8=((C8/(C7/100))-100).  I use C7 as my base, divide by 100 to give me a "per century) or "per 100" and then divide the cell I want to see the increase in by that number.  Then I subtract 100 to give me the percentage of increase only.

If you want to use a different formula be my guest, since we are doing a comparison between years it really doesn't matter what formula you use.  I will the results of my formula to discuss the results.

A more common formula would be ((Current Year-Previous Year)/Previous Year)*100 (or set cell format to percentage. The number is the same so whatever. If you don't come up with the same numbers I do, I don't care as long as your numbers represent and accurate ratio of spending increases that we can use for comparison. If you don't know what I mean, use one of the formulas above.

Obama takes over in 2009 and government spending rose 17.942% over 2008 in 2009.

Okay, so did anyone since Eisenhower increase spending more than Obama did?  Sure, Nixon did in 1975.

Now what kind of an increase in spending did Obama predict for 2009, lets look at the 2009 budget document.  Do the same percentage calculations on this sheet. Put a formula in cell K8 and then double click on the lower right corner to fill down.

Obama predicted a 6% increase in spending and spent 18% more. Good prediction there!

How about 2010? In 2009 Obama predicted a 0.5% drop in spending (-0.5% increase) and what do you know, spending went.....Negative (so Obama got the direction right) -1.75%. Again, Obama's prediction was way fricking off, although, in this case spending went down more than predicted. Good job.  Not really since we are making an assessment of the Obama administrations ability to accurate project spending, which is what Unger based his article on.  This prediction pretty much sucks.

How about 2011? In 2009 the spending prediction for 2011 was up 2.6% and spending went up 4.25% in the 2013 budget document.

So what have we learned? That Obama's predictions about the budget pretty much suck. Not even within 50% margin of error and 2 of the three predictions we can test are off 300% or more.

If we open the 2011 budget from GPO (just change the year if you have not figured that out) and we look at the predictions and actual spendings in the 2013 the numbers are a little closer. In 2011 the percentage increase in 2011 is predicted to be 3%.  A little better, still wrong though.

Okay, so we know the Obama admin budget predictions suck for the most part.

Rick Unger actually mentions in the article that he uses the spending predictions made by the Obama administration to arrive at his conclusions. So the guy used really sucky predictions to assess future spending.

How did Bush 2 do between 2001 and 2008. Obama took over in 2009 and we have real data for 3 years. Bush 2 increased spending an average of 6.6% over 8 years. The total increase in spending, percentage, from 2001 to 2008 is 60%. From 2009 to 2011 Obama increased spending an average of 6.8% and in three years has increased spending 2.4% from 2009 to 2011. In 2003 Bush 2 had increased spending 15%, of course Bush 2 was dealing with government spending after 9-11 also, but, that isn't relative since we are not looking at what the government did, just how much they increased spending.

Those numbers sound kind of weird...to weird for a writer to write about so Unger wrote an article about predictions, not reality

It wouldn't do to say “Obama increases spending more per year on average than Bush 2 did, but, has increased spending less in total” Telling the truth confuses people because so often reality is not the nice neat package we want it to be.

In reality these numbers don't mean a lot because we didn't look them in context, In relation to how much we actually made. The spending has to be looked at in the context of Gross Domestic product and Tax Receipts.

Unger's article is Bull Shit.  Reality is messier than the crap Unger wrote and we shall really see how poorly Obama has done around 2018-2019.  Claiming Obama is increasing government spending at the lowest rate since Eisenhower based on predictions as accurate as these are is total B.S. that only someone as ignorant as Unger could believe.