David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget commenting on Obama’s home refinance plan “It’s a bailout for Jamie Dimon.” When Obama tries to sell us this idea during the election season as a means of helping poor people we’ll all know better.

Jesus, I could make a full time job out of correcting Joe Weisenthal’s bullshit. He ran a story called “When Obama Runs For Re-Election, This Is The Chart He Will Use.” Joe states:

Obama’s monthly jobs record is WAY better than what it was in the months before he took office. In every commercial, he can just contrast his tenure with the period before it, and remind people how much better things are now. Also worth noting that the 8.3% unemployment rate is the lowest is since Obama’s first month in office.

The first problem with this chart is that it starts in December 2007, so all we see is a bunch of jobs being lost at the end of the Bush administration and a bunch of jobs being created during the Obama administration. Here is the chart you would have shown if you wanted to highlight Bush.

Hey, look, we had robust job growth for like 6 straight years. Awesome! Oops, there’s that little plunge at the end there…but it’s alright, Obama knows how to insert that stimulating magic!

And here’s what an honest person would have looked at.

That’s a whole lot less impressive isn’t it? For a look at how this recovery stacks up against the one after the recession of 1981 let’s look at a different chart.

(Data)

When you look at employment over an even longer scale you realize that there’s nothing particularly impressive about this recovery. It looks pretty meh to me.

Based on the history of postwar recessions a rebound in employment was inevitable. The fact that this rebound is so slow definitely doesn’t make Obama look good. Maybe Joe wasn’t saying his chart was accurate, maybe he was just suggesting that it paints a pretty picture for Obama. Either way, every post from Joe at BI is riddled with cherry picked data. Read him with many grains of salt.

Over at Business Insider Joe Weisenthal tries to make the case that Obama isn’t actually expanding the government very much and that fretting over deficits and government growth is for naught. He explains:

That premise is that Obama has been a wild spender, and that now there’s an urgent need to make cuts. As we highlighted yesterday, there’s simply nothing special about the growth of government spending under Obama. Here’s a look at annual real growth in government spending going back to 1947.

He then presents this chart.

His numbers seemed a little bizarre so I found the data and charted it myself. It turns out his chart wasn’t looking at year over year Federal outlays at all. This is what year over year federal spending look like compared to overall growth in spending compared to various administrations.

A commenter suggested that perhaps his chart included state and local data? Whatever the case, he was blatantly dishonest about spending growth under the Obama administration.

If this chart proves anything it is that neither party is actually committed to shrinking the government in practice, even if they claim to be in theory.

I’m frequently confronted with arguments like “cutting spending would deprive us of basic government services” and “we need to fund the FAA, police and firefighters.”

In order to put things in perspective and hopefully shame the people who make these silly arguments I put together a simple infographic.

Of course, police, fire fighters, roads and schools are all part of state and local budgets and have nothing to do with a debate on federal spending. Shame on you if use this as a rhetorical device as it is inaccurate, cheap and misleading. I couldn’t find reliable information on just how much it costs to build and maintain roads in America. That information is fairly dispersed but if you know a good source for that info please let me know. I used the FAA as an example of a “basic” service.