A VISUAL HISTORY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT DEFICITS: “A number of my readers are claiming that the only reason Obama is running such a big deficit is that revenue has collapsed. I don’t see that in the data. These figures are in constant dollars, so they’re unaffected by inflation/deflation, or the collapse in GDP; they’re simply an assessment of the absolute increase in spending compared to taxes. As you can see, there’s a huge increase under Obama–that huge upslope is the change between 2008 and 2009 spending levels.”