Obama not a big spender after all?

The liberals out there are going to love this one.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has compiled a chart (above) that track total government spending -- federal, state and local -- over the last three administrations. The numbers represent per-capita spending.

As you can see, the results are certainly not what Republicans would expect. Drum wrote that total government spending didn’t go up much during the Clinton era, and it’s actually declined during under President Obama. In the last two decades, it’s only gone up significantly during the Bush era.

A second chart by Drum (below) only included per-capital spending by the federal government, and it didn’t adjust for population growth. The only thing is adjusts for is inflation.

At The Washington Post, Ezra Klein suggested that Drum's second chart deserves more explanation.

"Part of the reason federal expenditures rose is that state and local expenditures fell so sharply. If you miss that information, you miss a lot of the story. For another, the sharp rise in federal spending begins in late-2009 and is largely over by 2010," Klein wrote on his Wonkbook blog.

So, the argument goes, the Great Recession caused a burst of federal spending in 2009-10, and that is largely the reason for Obama's mixed record.

Klein could have added that the chart wouldn't have looked a whole lot different if the Republicans had their way. Too many people forget that a $713 billion Senate GOP plan -- an alternative stimulus proposal offered shortly after the president took office -- was only slightly smaller than Obama's stimulus.