Walmart declined to sign on to a legally binding agreement to improve safety conditions at its factories but has pledged to do so voluntarily and to post the results of extensive inspections on its website.

Liberal groups such as the Center for American Progress criticized Walmart’s refusal to accede to a legally binding agreement.

Walmart has donated to the Center for American Progress (CAP) in the past. The Center for American Progress Action Fund’s blog, ThinkProgress, has written about the Bangladeshi factory collapse nine times and mentioned Walmart in three of those posts. None of the three posts that mentioned Walmart have noted its past financial support for CAP.

CAP did not respond to a request for comment on that failure to disclose the financial relationship.

“If we identify issues that cause us to believe that people’s lives are in danger, we will take swift action,” said Rajan Kamalanathan, Walmart’s vice president of ethical sourcing, in a news release.

Documents obtained by the New York Times indicated that a Walmart contractor was producing jeans at the Dhaka, Bangladesh, factory that collapsed last month, killing up to 1,100 workers and injuring as many as 2,500 more.

Walmart indicated that contractor Fame Jeans had lied to the company about its Bangladeshi production in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.

Fame Jeans “told us there was no previous production at Rana Plaza,” the factory in question, “but our suppliers have a binding obligation to disclose all factories producing Walmart merchandise,” Walmart spokesperson Megan Murphy said in an emailed statement.

Murphy said Walmart was ending its business relationship with Fame Jeans due to its policy on “unauthorized subcontracting.”

She stressed that Walmart had no operations in the Rana Plaza factory at the time of the disaster.

“Media reports have given the impression there was production for Walmart happening in Rana Plaza at the time of the tragic building collapse. That’s wrong,” Murphy said. She did not specify which media reports were inaccurate.

Contacted for comment, Times reporter Steven Greenhouse noted that nothing in Murphy’s statement contradicted his reporting.

“No one has challenged the facts of the story,” Greenhouse wrote. “No one has asked for a correction. No one has said there was anything wrong in the story.”

Organizing for Action and Enroll America were heavily involved in rallying the vote for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.

Politico reports:

If the coalition is successful, 30 million uninsured Americans will get health coverage and the now-unpopular law that Obama’s team pushed through Congress and defended at the Supreme Court could go down in history alongside lauded national institutions such as Medicare and Social Security.

But if large numbers of younger and healthier Americans don’t sign up for coverage this fall alongside the older and sicker ones, the whole thing won’t work. […]

They plan to use it to unleash the 20 million-address strong email list of Organizing for Action, to hire up to 100 people at Enroll America and to flood television, radio and social media with ads this fall. They even hope to go door to door, walking people through the sign-up process.

The efforts of these organizations are supported by secret and corporate money from groups that would directly benefit from millions of Americans being insured.

Enroll America’s board alone includes senior officials from Blue Shield of California, Kaiser Permanente, and Teva Pharmaceuticals. Additionally, Enroll America’s advisory council includes AARP, Aetna, CVS Caremark, the NAACP, and the Service Employees International Union.

According to Politico‘s Ken Vogel, other left-wing groups who will participate in the Obamacare push are Business Forward, the Center for American Progress, and the secretive donor network Democracy Alliance.

Business Forward, whose members include Microsoft, Visa, and Hilton, has set up meetings with the White House as the Washington Free Beacon has previously reported.

The number of possible nominees to replace outgoing Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Kamen writes, is decreasing. And “one name seems to be popping up increasingly.” That would be the name of (pop!) Tom Steyer, the San Francisco hedge fund billionaire and political activist whose financial prospects have an uncanny symmetry with the alternative energy policies of the present administration.

Steyer is not famous but would be if his portfolio were designed around carbon resource extraction rather than leveraging government connections to gain market share for windmills and solar panels. He is early twenty-first century progressivism incarnate, a suave and shrewd example of how the self-regard and political entrepreneurism of the filthy rich is glossed over and excused so long as they pay the right people and squawk the designated left-wing clichés.

The arc of Steyer’s life bends toward aristocracy. He was born in 1957 in New York City where his lawyer father worked on Wall Street. He was educated at the Buckley School on the Upper East Side and at Phillips Exeter and at Yale. He did a tour at Morgan Stanley and another at Goldman Sachs where his boss was the future Treasury Secretary and financial deregulator Robert Rubin. His MBA is from Stanford.

Steyer began to accumulate capital when he moved to San Francisco and entered the world of leveraged buyouts, private equity, and carried interest. He founded Farallon Capital Management in 1986. The firm is huge. Steyer’s net worth is estimated to be more than $1 billion. And though he seems always to have been a run-of-the-mill liberal Democrat of the coastal elite variety, in recent years he has taken to giving a large portion of that money away to political and environmental causes. As the New York Times put it in a backslapping 2011 profile, until 2010 Steyer “was just another billionaire hedge fund manager intent on keeping a low profile.” You know—just one of those. Obama changed him.

Steyer may have started the 2008 presidential cycle as a supporter of Hillary Clinton but like so many wealthy white Democrats he soon switched his allegiance to the freshman Senator from Illinois. He has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Obama’s campaigns and rounded up millions more. And he has been rewarded for his efforts: He’s enjoyed White House access, a speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention—imagine the berserk response if David Koch had addressed the RNC—and now has within his grasp a seat in the presidential cabinet from which he would direct taxpayer dollars to companies in which he holds or has held positions. “President Obama knows that advanced energy is America’s future,” Steyer told DNC delegates in Charlotte. “And my bet, as a businessman, is that he’s exactly right.”

The bet has paid off. The media may have neglected Steyer’s DNC speech but it was nonetheless revealing. The rhetorical trick of referring to solar and wind as “advanced” energies, when Australopithecus benefited from the sun and the first windmill seems to have been built in Roman Alexandria, is a fine irony. “Businessman” meanwhile may have been a fair description of Steyer’s occupation for most of his life but it now seems too confining. “Insider” would be better; “crony” better yet.

In 2009 Steyer helped found Greener Capital, a VC firm that profits from investments in companies benefiting from the pronounced shift in energy policy under Obama and Chu. Also in 2009 Steyer’s name began to appear on the tax filings of the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP), the think tank that formulated many of Obama’s advanced energy policies. Steyer’s charitable group, TomKat, has donated more than a million dollars to CAP, and he is listed as a director on its most recent form 990. This is the same think tank remember whose founder served as the head of Obama’s transition team and that provided a desk to Steven Spinner, the Obama donor and Department of Energy official who pushed for subsidies to the solar panel manufacturer Solyndra (whom his wife’s law firm represented). This is the same think tank that coordinated policy and message with loan program officials according to emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The association of Steyer and CAP has benefits. In January of this year Steyer coauthored a Wall Street Journal op-ed with John Podesta, “We Don’t Need More Foreign Oil and Gas,” that supported Obama’s decision not to approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada and argued for extending “clean-energy programs like the Production Tax Credit” and reviving “the Manufacturing Tax Credit, which helps factories retool for the clean-tech sector.” The authors failed to disclose that Steyer helps pay Podesta’s salary and that his investments would net millions if the federal government shaped public policy to his liking—millions of dollars that then would be funneled back into institutions like CAP and Democratic campaigns like Obama’s.

Reporters are like Amazonian piranhas when they detect similar positive feedback loops between rich conservatives and political and policy campaigns. But of course in this case they are far more interested in promoting Steyer’s views and congratulating him for his absolutely conventional positions on taxes and the environment. A 2008 profile of Steyer marveled at his “soak-the-rich mindset,” which author Adam Lashinsky said was just “one of the many ways” that the billionaire “embodies a different breed of investment professional than the Gucci loafer-wearing, Range Rover-driving, Bordeaux-inhaling traders who have made Greenwich, Conn., and Manhattan bubble over in recent years.” Steyer, by contrast, is “a financial whiz with a hankering for social justice,” an “athlete as well as a mathlete,” a “guy’s guy who requires guests at his annual Christmas lunch to bring a poem to read.”

One has to wonder whether Lashinsky searched Steyer’s closets and wine racks for Gucci loafers and Bordeaux and other signs of political deviance. Is it the contention of this article that Steyer is somehow unique among the Masters of the Universe because he played on Yale’s soccer team? Has Adam Lashinsky not actually ever met another person who has worked on Wall Street? Does pretentiously requiring underlings to recite Maya Angelou over  a catered turkey lunch absolve the rich and powerful from scrutiny and critique? Or is it merely the assumed possession of an insatiable “hankering for social justice” that leads credulous writers to forget that Steyer stands to gain much more money from having Obama build a clean energy economy than he would lose from a return to Clinton-era tax rates?

Such naïve cheerleading masquerading as “journalism” is a disservice to the public because it shields powerful men from investigation. After Steyer poured millions into a successful 2010 campaign to uphold California’s complicated system of carbon mandates and thus benefit his firms, the New York Times asked if he was “the anti-Koch” for whom liberals long have dreamed. Yet in between quoting various clichés from one of his speeches the Times blogger never stopped to consider that Steyer is doing precisely the thing for which liberals falsely attack the Koch brothers: influencing politics for personal gain.

When duly elected Rust Belt governors and legislators passed laws in Wisconsin and Ohio and Michigan to improve the business climates of their states the entire Western world searched for connections between their actions and the pocketbooks of Charles and David Koch. But when Steyer allocated $30 million for the campaign to support Proposition 39 on Election Day 2012, no one seemed to notice. Nor did many notice when the measure passed overwhelmingly and thus raised taxes on businesses incorporated outside California (i.e., businesses other than Farallon Capital Management and the alt-fuel companies in Silicon Valley) and used that money to fund $2.5 billion in … clean energy investments!

How appropriate then that Steyer announced in October he would step down from his position as head of Farallon so he can focus on “giving back.” As secretary of energy he would be giving taxpayer dollars back to the companies in whose future he holds lucrative stakes. He seems finally to have recognized that in America today finance capital is being displaced by political capital, and that philanthropy is a business more powerful and indeed more lucrative than running a hedge fund. He seems to have recognized that a billionaire who devotes his life to “public service” and “helping the environment” possesses the journalistic equivalent of Monopoly’s “Get of Jail Free” card. He recognized that believing in Barack Obama is a fast track to receiving gifts, and championing America’s “advanced energy economy” means never having to say you’re sorry.

Courtney Wheeler, the Obama campaign’s national voter protection coordinator, fielded a question from an attorney on the Sept. 18 call about certain tax-exempt organizations—groups organized under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code—that may be violating the law by engaging in overtly political activity.

“Is there any attention paid to those organizations who have not subtly but overtly indicated they intend to ignore their 501(c)(3) limitations and campaign?” the caller asked, according to an audio recording of the conversation obtained by the Free Beacon.

“We do work with some of the (c)(3)s in terms of just, like, volunteers and things like that,” Wheeler said in response. “But for the (c)(3)s that are not following their statuses, if you want to send us the information on this we can definitely follow up and make sure we’re, you know, any groups are obviously following the law.”

The admission by a campaign lawyer that the campaign does “work with some of the (c)(3)s” could put the nonprofit status of those groups at risk—even if the coordination is limited to “just, like, volunteers and things like that.”

The law is clear: 501(c)(3) groups are banned from doing any partisan “work” at all. “Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS website.

Wheeler and the Obama campaign did not return requests for comment regarding the extent of the campaign’s “work” with (c)(3) organizations, such as the left-wing think tank Center for American Progress.

The comments raised questions about this potentially illegal coordination, experts said.

“The restrictions are not terribly complicated, and pretty strict,” said Scott Coffina, a former White House associate counsel who handled political legal issues for the Bush administration. “If these groups are using volunteers to promote Obama in any way, that’s violating their neutrality principle.”

Neutral activities such as voter registration, voter education, or issue advocacy are permitted so long as they do not endorse one candidate or party over another. But coordinating activities with a campaign is absolutely forbidden, and such violations could cause the implicated (c)(3) groups to lose their tax-exempt status.

Scott Walter, executive vice president of the Capital Research Center, an organization that tracks the political activity of nonprofit groups, said that while illegal activity likely occurs, (c)(3) groups have become adept at coordinating with explicitly partisan groups in ways that “go up against the very edge of the law” without breaking it.

“I don’t think the violations are the problem, it’s the law that probably should be changed,” he told the Washington Free Beacon. “Not more regulation, but adjusting the outer limits of what (c)(3)s can do legally.”

Walter said (c)(3) organizations use voter registration drives and other outreach efforts in ways that are technically legal, but should be considered political activity. Liberal groups register voters on college campuses, for example, or at other locations that are highly likely to have a lot of Democratic voters. Conservative groups, on the other hand, often target places, such as churches, likely to attract Republicans.

Liberal groups sharing lists of individuals who may have expressed concern about environmental issues, and are thus likely to support Democrats, would be another example of how these organizations push the boundaries of the law.

“There’s a lot of legal dirtiness,” Walter said.

The Obama administration has long skirted such legal gray areas.

The Office of Special Counsel (OSC) ruled earlier this month that Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius violated the Hatch Act, the federal law prohibiting federal employees from engaging in partisan activities.

Sebelius made explicitly partisan remarks at what was intended to be an official administration event, OCS found, though she is unlikely to face punishment, according to the White House.

Sebelius has since returned to the campaign trail.

The Free Beacon previously reported on potentially illegal coordination between a top Energy Department official and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, as well two Federal Aviation Administration employees accused of illegally campaigning for Obama.

Clinton will speak before the Democracy Alliance today in an effort to haul in multi-million dollar Super PAC donations for Obama’s Super PAC, Priorities USA, according to the New York Times.

Bill Clinton will headline a lunch in New York to benefit Democratic groups. His audience will be members of the Democracy Alliance, a consortium of liberal donors, many of whom have been reluctant to make large contributions to Super PACs this year.

Far from being reluctant, the Alliance is prepared to raise $100 million for liberal groups and campaigns in 2012. Clinton is not the only Democratic VIP to make a presentation to the group. Following the 2010 Republican midterm sweep, Vice President Joe Biden beseeched the Alliance to begin pumping money into Obama’s reelection fund.

The group lifted its prohibition on campaign giving two months later and numerous members have since increased their contributions to the Obama campaign from 2008 levels, including several six-figure donations to Super PACs.

The Alliance operates on a venture capital model, selecting a handful of liberal organizations to receive its big-money donations. Members of the invitation-only group pledge to give $200,000 to the favored groups, which increasingly have close ties to the White House—the Center for American Progress and Media Matters each enjoy favored status. It does not disclose its recipients or members, who are forbidden from speaking to the press. The Alliance did not return numerous requests for comment.

Bilguudei Ganhuyag, 24, has accused John Landrum Bryant, husband of real estate heiress and liberal activist Patricia Bauman, of firing him for refusing to engage in a sexual relationship, according to DNAInfo.com. He is suing the power couple for $6 million.

The suit would put only a small dent into the Bauman family fortune, and the $100 million foundation Bauman uses to influence liberal circles.

Bauman has contributed nearly $300,000 to Democratic candidates and causes since 2008, and has financing some of liberalism’s largest organizations.

She contributed $10,000 to American Bridge 21st Century, a Super PAC that performs opposition research against Republican candidates. The Bauman Foundation also gave a total of $6,300 to President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns.

The Bauman Foundation has given millions of dollars more to liberal organizations over the past decade. Patricia Bauman also has tied to the secretive Democracy Alliance, which directs tens of millions of dollars into select progressive coffers each year, including the Center for American Progress, Media Matters, and the Obama affiliated Super PAC Priorities USA.

The Alliance is an association of wealthy liberal donors that directs political giving to a handful of “favored organizations.” It has also partnered with a number of foundations, giving it access to hundreds, rather than tens, of millions of dollars in liberal philanthropy.

“When you include foundations, the left has a far higher reach into big money than the right,” said Jacob Laksin, author of The New Leviathan. “They wield a lot of influence in Democratic circles … the Democracy Alliance is part of that.”

The Alliance does not handle any of the donations directly, which allows members to avoid disclosure. It did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment.

Alliance member Anne Bartley sits on the Bauman Foundation’s board of directors and has helped forge a partnership between the two groups. It is unclear if Bauman is a member of the group, which forbids members from publicly speaking about the group’s inner workings.

Bauman did not return calls and emails seeking comment.

Among the most notable of these gatherings will be a party thrown by Wal-Mart for the Center for American Progress (CAP), the liberal think-tank that has become an incubator for administration policy, including the green-energy loans that have been badly tarnished by allegations of cronyism and corruption.

The party, first reported by Politico, will reunite Center for American Progress chairman John Podesta with his brother Tony Podesta, whose Podesta Group lobby shop is cohosting the party, and which also has a lengthy roster of controversial corporate clients including bailed out Bank of America and GE, which paid no federal taxes in 2010. John Podesta helped found the lobbying group with his brother before starting the Center for American Progress with undisclosed funds.

While CAP does not disclose its donors, Wal-Mart has disclosed giving between $500,000 and $1 million to the group over the last decade.

CAP pointedly has avoided criticism of Wal-Mart despite the company’s anti-union activism, focusing its attacks on companies such as Koch Industries, which has thousands of union employees but has refused to donate funds to the Center for American Progress.

The Charlotte party will offer a chance for Tony Podesta’s clients to network with Center for American Progress “policy experts,” and for companies like Wal-Mart to stay in the good graces of an influential organization with close ties to the Obama administration.

Speaking with MSNBC anchor Melissa Harris-Perry and United Republic reporter Lee Fang on Saturday, CAPAF board member Peter Edelman said “everything I do discloses where the money comes from. Completely.”

The group was responding to accusations of hypocrisy for attacking the Koch brothers, the conservative duo that has funneled millions of dollars into causes they support, for secrecy.

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: I was really excited about the idea of a Koch brothers representative being here because I feel like everybody ought to have their say—we gave them the opportunity with this statement. But they also very pointedly went around this table—we told them who else we’d be speaking with—and at each point they suggested that everyone else at the table was also guilty of the things we are suggesting they are her, which is secrecy. They said that, Lee, your former employer, the Center for American Progress, as well as United Republic, don’t disclose their donors. Alicia Menedez, your former employer, the New Democrat Network, keeps their donors’ contributions not public and then they said of us as professors, that we go to academic conferences that do not allow the media. I can’t even imagine what the media would want to know about what goes on–I think we’d be really excited to have some press at our conferences, even if we would have very low ratings. So what say you to these statements by the Koch brother foundation?

PETER EDELMAN: I couldn’t wait to hear what the accusation was for me and my thing. i mean, I’ve worked for a university, I’m chair of a foundation–everything that I do, I am on the board of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, everything I do discloses where the money comes from completely.

LEE FANG: And you know, I work for United Republic. We disclose our donors, so I’m not sure where Koch is getting their facts. But it’s hard to trust the Koch PR shop. In 2009, they put out aggressive statements to the media, we have nothing to do with the tea party. We demand a correction from anyone who associates us with the Tea Party. Now, they say we’re proud to support the Tea Party and we’ve also financed them.

CAP and its sister organization, CAPAF, do not reveal their funding sources. News reports have identified major donors over the years, such as billionaire investor George Soros, Progressive Insurance chairman Peter B. Lewis, and Hollywood producer Steve Bing. The group has also received funds from energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens to promote natural gas legislation and smear coal.

CAP and CAPAF have drawn criticism in the past for their lack of transparency.

When reached for statement, a spokeswoman for the Center for American Progress Action Fund said she didn’t “have any comment at this time” but would forward along questions to her superiors. So far, the organization has yet to respond.

Edelman could not be reached for comment.

United Republic, a non-profit group that advocates for campaign finance reform, recently disclosed its donors months after originally promising to.

Sandler, a former Wall Street securities analyst, was prominently featured, along with her husband Herb, on Time magazine’s list of “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis.” The Sandlers co-founded Golden West Financial, which through its World Savings Bank unit became the first financial firm to offer the so-called adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM), a controversial home loan that allowed borrowers to make low monthly payments while increasing the balance owed.

After introducing the ARM in the early 1980s, Time wrote, the Sandlers “pushed the mortgage … with increasing zeal and misleading advertisements over the next two decades.”

The Sandlers pocketed $2.4 billion from the 2006 sale of Golden West to Wachovia, which nearly collapsed two years later before being bought by Wells Fargo. Critics blamed the preponderance of toxic ARM loans acquired from Golden West for Wachovia’s demise.

A satirical sketch on “Saturday Night Live” suggested the Sandlers “should be shot” for their roles in the financial crisis, though the sketch was ultimately edited for rebroadcast to remove the claim.

The Sandlers put their fortune to use, financing a variety of left-wing causes. They donated millions to help start the Center for American Progress in 2003, and had contributed about $20 million to the left-wing think tank as of 2008.

The Sandlers donated considerable sums over the years to prominent liberal groups such as Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union, ACORN, and MoveOn.org.

The couple contributed $8.5 million in 2004 to Citizens for a Strong Senate, a 527-group set up by former staffers of disgraced Sen. John Edwards (D., N.C.). Years later they spent tens of millions to launch the left-leaning journalism outfit ProPublica.

Marion Sandler personally donated tens of thousands of dollars to Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and other Democratic candidates since 2008. Her husband gave $2.5 million to the MoveOn.org Voter Fund in 2004.

Both were members of the secretive cabal of liberal elites known as the Democracy Alliance, which recently held a secret conference in Miami to discuss strategy in the 2012 election.

Marion Sandler was 81.

The post was authored by Michael Linden, Director for Tax and Budget Policy at the action fund, and argues, “Spending, taxes, and deficits are all lower today than when [President] Obama took office.”

Linden cites figures from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO)—specifically, its 10-year projections for fiscal years 2009 and 2012—to support his claim:

In January 2009, before President Obama had even taken the oath of office, annual spending was set to total 24.9 percent of gross domestic product. Total spending this year, fiscal year 2012, is expected to top out at 23.4 percent of GDP.

Here’s another interesting fact. Taxes today are lower than they were on inauguration day 2009. Back in January 2009, the CBO projected that total federal tax revenue that year would amount to 16.5 percent of GDP. This year? 15.8 percent.

One last nugget. The deficit this year is going to be lower than what it was on the day President Obama took office. Back then, the CBO said the 2009 deficit would be 8.3 percent of GDP. This year’s deficit is expected to come in at 7.6 percent.

The post and its accompanying chart have been touted by Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt, MSNBC host Ed Schultz, and the official Democratic Party twitter account.

However, though they are technically accurate, the figures are also deceptive.

“There’s so much wrong with the argument they’re trying to advance here,” said Yuval Levin, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

“Saying that these numbers are lower than on the day President Obama took office is not the same thing as saying that his policies lowered them,” one former White House economic adviser told the Washington Free Beacon. “We’d expect the numbers to improve, quite dramatically in fact, after the crisis ended.”

According to data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the current recovery has significantly lagged compared with those that occurred following other deep recessions over the past 60 years.

The most glaring problem with Linden’s post, one budget analyst told the Free Beacon, is that CBO’s spending projections for 2009 were vastly inflated by temporary funding measures such as TARP ($184 billion net cost scored to 2009, out of $700 billion total) and the federal bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ($218 billion).

Absent that temporary funding, federal spending according to CBO’s projection comes out at about 22 percent of GDP, nearly three points lower than the figure Linden cites, and less than the 2012 projection of 23.4 percent.

The deficit projection would have been 5.4 percent of GDP without the temporary funding, more than two points lower than the 2012 projection of 7.6 percent.

In other words, if the temporary measures invoked to stem the economic crisis are taken out of the equation, both spending and deficits have increased significantly since Obama took office, to levels not seen since World War II. Between 1950-2007, the federal government has averaged just over 20 percent of GDP in spending and just over 2 percent of GDP in deficits.

As noted in President Obama’s latest budget proposal, actual spending was 24.3 percent of GDP in 2012; deficits were 8.5 percent.

“[It] is basically an acknowledgment of the fact that Obama wants to make a crisis year (2008-09) into the new normal,” said Levin. “They’re saying spending this year, when we are supposedly three years after the end of the recession, is okay at just a hair below the highest level since World War II, a highest level we achieved in the course of responding to a massive economic crisis. That’s not something to be proud of; it’s an admission of utter failure.”

“One way to think of it is that Obama has replaced large, one-time spending with large, persistent spending—and it will get bigger after 2012 with the new health law,” said former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin.

Furthermore, the CBO estimate for 2009 does not take into account the $787 billion stimulus package and other spending measures enacted under Obama. This discrepancy is clearly illustrated by the same CBO projections cited in Linden’s post.

In 2009, CBO foresaw federal spending at 21.1 percent of GDP in 2012, or about $3.39 trillion. That is essentially a projection of what would happen absent any changes to current law.

Actual spending in 2011 was more than three percentage points of GDP, or $240 billion, higher.

The deficit was projected to fall to just $264 billion, or 1.6 percent of GDP. The actual deficit was $1.3 trillion, or 8.5 percent of GDP.

When it comes to taxes, measuring revenue as a percentage of GDP is not correlated with tax rates, but is a reflection of economic performance. Tax revenues will be low in a persistently sluggish economy. “They are merely showing that the economy remains very weak … that we haven’t recovered from the recession,” said Levin.

Furthermore, the CBO projections Linden cites to claim that taxes are lower under Obama do not comport with the historical tables maintained by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which show that the CBO estimates were off and that revenue has actually increased between 2009-2012.

OMB notes that actual revenue was 15.1 percent of GDP in 2009, and projects revenue in 2012 to reach 15.8 percent of GDP.

Obama, who as a candidate in 2008 said George W. Bush was “unpatriotic” for adding $4 trillion to the national debt, is on pace to increase the debt $6.2 trillion by the end of his four-year term.

President Obama promised in 2009 to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, and reiterated that pledge as recently as February 2011. He has not even come close to meeting that goal, however.

The deficit, according to OMB, was $1.4 trillion when Obama took office. CBO estimates that this year’s deficit will reach $1.2 trillion.