Who?s worse on spending in the red?

You might remember a recent kerfuffle involving Karl Rove and David Axelrod; each made the case that the other?s patron (Bush 43 and Obama, respectively) represented the worst of the big-spending presidents.

Kevin A. Hassett examines the evidence in the latest National Review. You might expect that he proclaims Rove the clear winner in the dispute. You would be mistaken.

Hassett offers two forms of analysis. First, the simple method: subtract the national debt a president inherited from the national debt he left to his successor. This is ?debt added.?

Second, a more subtle approach: compare the debt that exists when a president leaves office with the eighth-year debt projection the Congressional Budget Office had forecast at the time that president took office. (In other words, compare the debt at the start of 2009 with the debt the CBO had projected in 2001 for 2009.) Hassett calls this figure ?debt surprise.?

[F]or Bush, the two methods give strikingly different answers. In 2001, when he took office, the CBO projected that there would be large surpluses in 2008 and that the national debt would decline steadily. Those surpluses never appeared, in part because of Bush?s profligate spending and tax cuts and in part because hopes of economic growth were disappointed. The sum of money that the U.S. owed to all lenders increased on Bush?s watch by almost $5 trillion more than the CBO expected in 2001. But since the CBO started with a forecasted surplus, the actual increase in U.S. debt was much smaller, a bit more than $2 trillion.

When Obama took office, the CBO already knew that the economy was terrible, so it projected large deficits. The national debt has increased by more than expected, but only by $1.47 trillion more. The absolute increase in the debt over that same time, however, was a whopping $3.5 trillion. So if you think that presidents should be scored by what actually happened, Rove wins. If you think they should be scored relative to expectation, Axelrod does.

Hassett adds one more caveat: Rove would win the argument under either system if you make an apples-to-apples comparison of eight years of Bush with a hypothetical eight years of Obama. Rolling Obama?s policies forward to 2016, the ?debt surprise? would surpass $5 trillion.