Dear MAGA: Open Topic 20181120

vaguely remember the controversy, if it could even be considered as such in reality. Well, obviously, you hit a nerve. It must have been bewildering: ‘What did I write?’

He never tried to make the claim again, and as near as I could tell, people forgot about it, and the thread didn’t turn into any kind of big brouhaha at all.
I’m not even sure you and I are thinking of the same incident.
[It was a time when he was claiming that the government was collecting money from both payroll tax and regular taxes (the biggest of those being income tax) for social security, spending one of the two on social security and the other on Godknowswhat. The problem was he was wrong about the amount of regular taxes being collected.]
I got away with that one; it had nothing to do with my being banned (unless he had a low-level resentment against me and my other criticism was the last straw.)

Oh… and someone else (Sylvia? I think so.) recently here expressed her worry that if he could be so wrong about Q and “Trust Sessions” vs. “Trust the Plan” what else was he wrong about?
That bit about the budget made me wonder the same thing. (E.g., he made the claim that Obola’s emergency spending bill from the first year of his administration was being spent again and again. But that’s not as easy to prove or disprove as the one I did go after, so I don’t know one way or the other.) He seemed better at digging into the Deep State Coup than dealing with the budget. But now I wonder about even that.

In case it wasn’t clear; I didn’t argue against SDs porkulus theory back then, I merely began to question it later because of the other really rather elementary flub he pulled in the post I’m thinking about.
But there’s no time like the present to actually look into the porkulus-is-continuing theory. And once I do so, I discount it as well.
http://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_usxbudget_history.htm
That’s basically a top level spreadsheet of government spending, receipts, outlays, then broken down between on and off budget items.
It does indeed show a 500 billion or so spending step-up (from 2982 to 3517 billion) between 2008 and 2009. BUT, that was the bank bailout in October 2008, which is part of FY 2009. That SHOULD have gone down, however, the next year, and that, I think is when the porkulus took over (If I recall correctly it was part of FY 2010). And it never dropped off, but then, it didn’t continue to increase that much either, spending for the next few years was actually in a fairly tight range and sometimes even went down from one year to the next. In 2013, outlays were 3454 billion, which is actually less than 2009.
So I’d say the spendulus theory is at best only partially true. The fact that spending clearly didn’t grow at an 8 percent rate tells me the spendulus gradually disappeared. For that matter, it was supposedly 900 billion and a jump of that size never showed up in the first place.
Maybe these numbers are fake. If so I welcome a better source.