Can we just stipulate that graphics from whitehouse.gov are just going to exist to serve a political purpose, no matter who is president? Isn't this better than getting into pint less and endless political debates? Flagged.

BTW, there are a lot of great graphs about this subject out there -- and they're useful, too. Aside from the political spin, I can hardly decipher this graph, much less use it to explore the targeted subject.

The underlying logical and political problem here is that the things being compared are not related to each other. That is, the entire purpose of having elections and having both a legislature to create a yearly budget and an executive to enact it is to control and adjust the application of previous policies. To argue otherwise would be to assert either the system itself is broken beyond repair, and/or the current people elected are incompetent -- neither of which I can see the Whitehouse doing.