The Humbug Assembly Line

Paul Krugman points out:

When discussing the alleged huge expansion of government under Mr. Obama, I’ve repeatedly found that people just won’t believe me when I try to point out that it never happened. They assume that I’m lying, or somehow cherry-picking the data. After all, they’ve heard over and over again about that surge in government spending and employment, and they don’t realize that everything they’ve heard was a special delivery from the Humbug Express.

The Humbug Express, as Krugman terms it, turned a temporary increase in government employment because of the Census, into a huge increase in government, when the government payrolls are actually shrinking.