I'm not counting tax expenditures as spending. I'm counting outlays as spending. There is 1.7 trillion in additional outlays between the budgets. And I'd say very little of this was in response to the economy. Those stimulus outlays/tax cuts were already planned when the 2010 budget rolled out. Most of it probably comes from the health care plan that they lied about and said wouldn't cost anything.
Ok, I'm guessing your are taking this claim from the
Heritage.org. None of this comes from the health care plan because that wasn't in place when
this nonsense was being put together. But since you want to use this analysis lets look at the actual changes in spending as listed
here.Where is the growth in spending relative to GDP between 2008 and 2020? SS, Medicare, Medicaid.
What are causes of these deficits? How about this
view. The white bar at the bottom are the share of the deficits not related to the tax cuts, the wars, and the economic downturn. This comes from this
article and is rebutted
here .
Neither of these articles perfectly represent my view, but the Heritage.org's contextless copying of numbers is not worth anything. However, Mr Brian Riedl at Heritage eventually states -
As for future budget deficits, tax revenues are projected to soon reach their historical average. As spending surges to 6 percent of GDP above its historical average by 2020,
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (along with net interest) are the moving variables responsible for the vast majority of this growth
How is Obama responsible for these spending increases? If you want to argue he is not doing enough to slow down this growth in spending then fair enough, but to argue that this is new spending is just ignorant nonsense.