He certainly claimed to have done so in his press conference on Monday, which even a simple look at federal spending over the last several years belies. In my column for The Week on Tuesday, I ran through the math:
“Over the years,” Obama told the White House press corps, “I’ve signed into law about $1.4 trillion in spending cuts.” That may be news to most Americans, who see the federal government on track for a fifth straight year of trillion-dollar deficits under Obama. As these deficits show, Obama hasn’t done anything to bring the government in line with its revenues. In the FY2009 budget that Democrats kept out of Bush’s hands and which Obama approved in a final omnibus bill in March 2009, Bush proposed a spending level of $3.1 trillion, but Washington ended up spending $3.5 trillion instead, thanks in large part to the economic crisis.
That level of spending hasn’t abated. In fact, it has increased. The budget submitted by Obama in early 2012 for FY2013 proposed $3.8 trillion in new spending, an increase of 31 percent over the final Bush-Democratic Congress budget, and a 9 percent increase over the budget Obama signed two months into his term. So where exactly has spending been “cut”?
Investors Business Daily also did the math, and agrees that Obama’s claim comes up significantly short of reality. They compare Obama’s future deficit trajectory to the proposal from Obama’s own Simpson-Bowles commission in this chart, calling it the Big Deficit Gulch:
RIGHT'S RIGHT 
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Wed Jan 16, 2013 11:32 am
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