Peter quotes CBS White House correspondent Mark Knoller as writing the debt increase under Obama has been “the most rapid increase in the debt under any U.S. president.”

That’s not quite correct. The debt has risen about 40 percent under Obama, in a little more than two and a half years. But it rose more than 4,000 percent in four years under Abraham Lincoln, 2,000 percent in Woodrow Wilson’s last four years, and 640 percent in FDR’s last four years. Of course, those three presidents had to fight wars of utterly unprecedented size. The debt under Obama has ballooned partly because of the recession and increased entitlement costs, but also to a major extent in pursuit of a political agenda that most of the country finds obnoxious.

As Byron York points out in the Washington Examiner, of this fiscal year’s estimated $1.399 trillion deficit, $338 billion is attributable to lower federal revenues (compared with fiscal 2007, the last year of prosperity), and $343 billion on “income security”–food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, etc.–again, over and above the costs of those programs in 2007. So $681 billion of the deficit is due to the recession. Social Security and Medicare increases amounted to $281 billion of the deficit. That means $437 billion–almost a third of the total deficit–is due to increased spending on a Democratic wish list masquerading as “stimulus.” As York explains,

There is no line in the federal budget that says “stimulus,” but Obama’s massive $814 billion stimulus increased spending in virtually every part of the federal government. “It’s spread all through the budget,” says former Congressional Budget Office chief Douglas Holtz-Eakin. “It was essentially a down payment on the Obama domestic agenda.” Green jobs, infrastructure, health information technology, aid to states — it’s all in there, billions in increased spending.

No wonder his Gallup and Rasmussen favorable/unfavorable ratings are in the tank. I hope the president is enjoying his sojourn with the insufficiently taxed millionaires, billionaires, and corporate-jet owners who inhabit Martha’s Vineyard in the summer. I suspect it’s going to be a bumpy autumn back in Washington.