Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, Director of Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Over the past two weeks, a couple of charts — one from yours truly and one from Rex Nutting at MarketWatch — have really riled up conservatives and confused a fair number of DC establishment media types. For the past three years, it has been an article of faith among those folks that President Obama went on some kind of spending binge. And a casual glance at yearly spending figures does appear to support that charge. But what my chart and Rex’s chart show is that, once you account for the fact that most of the increase in spending from fiscal year 2008 to 2009 happened before President Obama even took office, then the “binge” utterly vanishes.

And this is the key point. The only way to show that spending has gone up dramatically under President Obama is to pretend like he had complete control over what was spent in fiscal year 2009. And that notion is utterly false.

First of all, recall that President Obama took office nearly four months into fiscal year 2009. That simple fact, all by itself, is enough to discount any “analysis” that merely compares fiscal year 2008 spending to fiscal year 2009, and tries to attribute the entire difference to President Obama.

But it actually goes beyond that. By the time President Obama took office, nearly all the dramatic increase in spending had already been baked into the cake. How do we know that? Well, in January 2009, before President Obama had even taken office, the Congressional Budget Office projected that federal spending would exceed $3.5 trillion for fiscal year 2009, half a trillion more than the government spent in 2008. Again, that was BEFORE President Obama event took office. It’s reasonable to use that number as our best guess at what spending would have been in FY2009 under ANY president. That’s what my chart from last week did.

Of course, the CBO’s projections aren’t perfect. They change as the economy changes and as laws change. Fortunately, CBO also tells us in subsequent reports how and why its previous estimates have changed. We can use that to understand how much of the total federal spending in fiscal year 2009 was attributable to legislative changes that occurred AFTER President Obama took office.

The answer is that out of a total of $3.5 trillion actually spent in FY09, only $165 billion, less than 5 percent, was the result of policy changes signed into law by President Obama.

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Republican efforts to cut the debt and put people back to work would help the United States economy avoid “European-style austerity,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) said on NBC’s Meet The Press yesterday.

The House GOP budget seemingly embraces that model, calling for massive reductions in spending like those that have led to double-dip recessions across Europe. And though analyses have found that the budget, which Ryan authored, would actually add to the national debt, the GOP’s vision is necessary to address joblessness and avoid austerity, he said:

RYAN: What we’re saying is let’s get on growth and prevent austerity. The whole premise of our budget is to pre-empt austerity by getting our borrowing under control, having tax reform for economic growth, and preventing Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid from going bankrupt. That pre-empts austerity. The president, his budget, the fact the Senate hasn’t done a budget in three years, puts us on a path towards European-like austerity. That’s what we’re trying to prevent from happening in the first place.

Watch it:

Not only would Ryan’s plan add to the debt, it would also increase the number of people who are looking for a job, resulting in a net loss of 4.1 million jobs over the next two years, according to the Economic Policy Institute:

The Ryan budget would nevertheless immediately enact aggressive spending cuts — particularly to the social safety net — which would reduce employment by 1.3 million jobs in fiscal 2013 and 2.8 million jobs in fiscal 2014, relative to current budget policies.

Ryan claims he wants to avoid European-style austerity, rein in the debt, and put people back to work. His plan, however, would end similarly to European austerity, leading to higher levels of debt and an unnecessary and unneeded spike in joblessness.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s budget would add $10.7 trillion to the debt and reduce federal revenues to just 15 percent of GDP, exploding the “prairie fire of debt” Romney warned the nation about in a speech last week in Iowa.

Romney isn’t the only one decrying the debt while ignoring that his budget would make it worse. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), in an appearance on Fox News this morning, made the laughable claim that a budget that explodes the debt will simultaneously prevent a debt crisis:

RYAN: More to the point, though, the kind of budget Mitt Romney is talking about is one that prevents a debt crisis.

Watch it:

Ryan praised Romney’s 20 percent, across-the-board tax cuts that are paid for, he claims, by closing loopholes that primarily benefit the wealthy. The only problem with that, of course, is that Romney hasn’t laid out such a plan, and even if he did, it wouldn’t make up enough revenue to avoid adding trillions to the national debt.

This isn’t anything new from Ryan. Though he paints himself as a very serious person who is trying to reduce the debt, he authored the House GOP’s radical budget plan, which manages to add to the debt despite cutting spending on programs that help the poor and middle classes because, like Romney, he gives away trillions in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans.

Mitt Romney yesterday traveled to Iowa, where he decried the “prairie fire of debt” that President Obama has supposedly allowed to engulf the nation. But Romney neglected to mention that his own economic plan would add $10.7 trillion to the debt, reducing federal revenue to just 15 percent of GDP.

As the Associated Press reported today, “Romney’s tax and spending plans don’t support his vow to dampen the debt fire.” But don’t tell that to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who said to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that Romney’s tax plan won’t blow up the deficit:

SCARBOROUGH: So you talk about Mitt Romney talking about how he’s going to be responsible. You look at Mitt Romney’s plans, though, you add them all up, the deficit goes up as much under Mitt Romney as it does under Barack Obama. You know, if you look at their plans, there’s not a big difference.

RYAN: Oh, there’s a huge difference. Are you kidding me?

SCARBOROUGH: At the end of the day Paul, how much is the national debt going to be reduced under Mitt Romney’s tax plans and spending plans?

RYAN: So, under Mitt Romney’s tax plan, he’s keeping revenues where they historically have been, which they actually rise from where they are now, just like our budget does.

Watch it:

But Romney has simply asserted that his tax plan will be deficit neutral, because he will limit tax deductions for the richest Americans, without laying out any way to actually achieve that end. He’s even admitted that this rather relevant part of his plan is missing.

And he hasn’t laid out the spending plans that would supposedly cut the deficit either. As the AP put it, “the closest [Romney] has come to laying out a specific spending plan has been in his endorsement of the budget blueprint passed this year by House Republicans, which also fails to produce his promised deficit reductions.”

Even if Romney actually followed through on his pledge to limits deductions for the rich, he would need 6.5 percent economic growth for the next five years to keep his tax plan from adding to the deficit. The best five-year period of growth since World War II was from 1961 to 1966, when the economy grew at 5.8 percent per year, meaning Romney would have to see the greatest growth of the post-war period simply to keep his tax plan out of the red.

Of course, this is just par for the course for Ryan, who pulled the same trick with the House Republican budget, pledging to close tax loopholes and limit deductions, but refusing to give any specifics.

Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, Director for Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Federal spending is lower now than it was when President Obama took office. I’ll pause to let you absorb the news.

In January 2009, before President Obama had even taken the oath of office, annual spending was set to total 24.9 percent of gross domestic product. Total spending this year, fiscal year 2012, is expected to top out at 23.4 percent of GDP.

Here’s another interesting fact. Taxes today are lower than they were on inauguration day 2009. Back in January 2009, the CBO projected that total federal tax revenue that year would amount to 16.5 percent of GDP. This year? 15.8 percent.

One last nugget. The deficit this year is going to be lower than what it was on the day President Obama took office. Back then, the CBO said the 2009 deficit would be 8.3 percent of GDP. This year’s deficit is expected to come in at 7.6 percent.

The fact is that Obama inherited a disaster of a federal budget. Eight years prior, when President George W. Bush took the oath of office, there was a $281 billion surplus. By the time Obama was sworn in, he was facing a $1.2 trillion deficit. Inconvenient though it may be for conservatives (especially those who are running for president), the truth is that spending, taxes and the deficit are all lower today than when President Obama took office.

House Republicans have touted their budget as a prescription for economic growth that will return the United States economy to prosperity. In reality, as ThinkProgress has documented, the GOP budget slashes social spending on programs that protect the most vulnerable while giving more than $3 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest among us — and even after all that, it not only fails to reduce the national debt but actually adds to it.

More than 60 percent of the spending cuts in the GOP budget would come from programs that benefit the poor, including food assistance, Women, Infant, and Children programs, and potentially even tax credits that have huge effects on poverty and hunger. Those cuts would undoubtedly not only hurt adults in struggling families, but harm children as well. According to a new report from the Half In Ten project at the Center for American Progress, millions of children will lose assistance from a number of services, as the following infographic shows:

As Half In Ten’s Melissa Boteach noted yesterday, the GOP budget would also boot nearly 280,000 children from school lunch programs, even while protecting a massive tax break for multimillionaires.

Under the guise of creating economic prosperity, Republicans have pursued a tax-and-cut ideology with reckless abandon over the last two years, taking the axe to vital social safety net programs while also cutting tax rates on the wealthy. The casualties of the Republican agenda, however, are not numbers on a chart — they are poor kids who are struggling to survive.