Obama has reduced the deficit. Period.

We often hear (and will continue to hear) an incorrect assertion that President Obama has increased the deficit.  Mitt Romney’s own campaign website states, “Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history.”

This is a lie and based largely on counting Bush spending as Obama spending.  It has been fact checked thoroughly, but Romney and other Republican critics of Obama continue to use repeat this lie including in the first Presidential debate.  In fact, the deficit is lower in 2012 than it was when Obama took office, and once adjusted for inflation, Obama has actually reduced government spending at a rate faster than Presidents Kennedy, Carter, Nixon, Clinton, both George Bush’s, and even Ronald Reagan (see table below).

Here are the numbers from the CBO:

Oct 2008 to Oct 2009 – $1.2 trillion deficit (On Jan 2009, 2 weeks before Obama took office the CBO correctly projected this deficit.  On other words, this was estimated before Obama had implemented ANY policies)
Oct 2009 to Oct 2010 – $1.4 trillion deficit (this number still has much of Bush’s policies, including the TARP but also  includes much of Obama’s policies battling the  financial crisis hit the budget)
Oct 2010 to Oct 2011 – $1.3 trillion deficit
Oct 2011 to Oct 2012 – $1.1 trillion

The fact is that Obama has presided over historic reduction in spending compared to his predecessors.  Here’s a table using inflation-adjusted figures that tells that story (ranked from most increases in spending to least):

So when Mitt Romney states that spending under Obama has “accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history,” what he should be saying is that spending under Obama has actually risen “slower than at any time in nearly 60 years.”