James Pethokoukis of the Enterprise Blog has been having a lot of fun at Rex Nutting's expense. Nutting was the guy who came out and said earlier this week that the GOP was lying about Obama being a big spender. First, Pethokoukis posted a blog showing how Nutting was, well...nuts. Federal spending as a share of GDP has skyrocketed under Obama. Now Jim has posted another graph that's even more devastating: the percentage increase in federal spending under Obama: Nutting's methodology assumes spending in the first year of a presidential term should be credited to the previous president. OK, fine. But he attributed a $410 billion spending bill in March of 2009 to George W. Bush even though it was signed by Barack Obama. Nutting also didn't use inflation adjusted numbers. But I did both of those and got wildly different results from Nutting, as seen in the chart at the top of this post. (Note: I looked at absolute spending as opposed to the rate of increase.) My numbers show that...(Read Full Post)