Sean Trende takes Paul Krugman to the wood shed:
Let’s also be clear that an awful lot of this spending is Obama’s spending, not Bush’s. The summary tables for Bush’s last budget (FY09) can be found here. Bush wasn’t doing ten-year budgeting, but his outlays for 2011 were $3.1 trillion, for 2012 were $3.2 trillion and for 2013 were $3.3 trillion. That represents a $700 billion, $600 billion, and $600 billion increase over the baseline for spending that President Bush was anticipating. Even generously allocating $200 billion for putting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan back in the budget (where they should have been in the first place) and $200 billion for increased interest on the debt from 2008 and 2009 for TARP/stimuli, that’s a pretty significant delta in the final Bush baseline and the initial Obama baseline, and it occurs well after the “temporary surge” in spending has supposedly wound down. And while Obama can argue that spending declines from 25.4% of GDP in 2010 to 22.8% of GDP in 2013 (before beginning an inexorable rise), that is still substantially higher than the 18.6% peak that President Bush foresaw.