> there's no denying that federal spending is way up and revenues are
> down.
It's only a question of what you mean by "way up" -- and what you think the response to saying that should be.
Did you read his article yesterday? Today's graphs were just a clarification about the screaming on the right about "way up" ... so are you with them?
---
Hey, Small Spender http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/opinion/11krugman.html
<excerpt> So as I said, the big government expansion everyone talks about never happened. This fact, however, raises two questions. First, we know that Congress enacted a stimulus bill in early 2009; why didn't that translate into a big rise in government spending? Second, if the expansion never happened, why does everyone think it did?
Part of the answer to the first question is that the stimulus wasn't actually all that big compared with the size of the economy. Furthermore, it wasn't mainly focused on increasing government spending. Of the roughly $600 billion cost of the Recovery Act in 2009 and 2010, more than 40 percent came from tax cuts, while another large chunk consisted of aid to state and local governments. Only the remainder involved direct federal spending.
And federal aid to state and local governments wasn't enough to make up for plunging tax receipts in the face of the economic slump. So states and cities, which can't run large deficits, were forced into drastic spending cuts, more than offsetting the modest increase at the federal level.
The answer to the second question - why there's a widespread perception that government spending has surged, when it hasn't - is that there has been a disinformation campaign from the right, based on the usual combination of fact-free assertions and cooked numbers. And this campaign has been effective in part because the Obama administration hasn't offered an effective reply.
</excerpt>