I'm not entirely sure that this is something to crow about, but it is an interesting metric, especially with the election coming up. From CAP:
All told, the Recovery Act included $243 billion worth of tax cuts through 2012.
Nearly two years after signing his first big tax cut bill into law, President Obama completely outdid himself by signing the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010, commonly known as the December 2010 tax deal. The biggest element of the December deal was the extension, for two additional years, of all the Bush tax cuts and alternative minimum tax relief, at a two-year combined cost of more than $400 billion.
In addition, the deal extended a variety of business tax cuts and incentives, which reduced revenues by some $150 billion, and it cut the estate tax—a tax paid by only a very few super-wealthy, massive estates—by $65 billion. The December tax bill also cut the payroll tax paid by employees by 2 percentage points, delivering more than $110 billion in tax cuts to working Americans.
Put it all together, and in one fell swoop, President Obama cut taxes by $654 billion in 2011 and 2012 alone. In other words, with this bill President Obama cut taxes by more, in raw dollar amounts, in just half of his term than George W. Bush did over his full first term.
With the huge Recovery Act tax cuts and the enormous December 2010 tax cuts combined, President Obama has already signed into law tax cuts amounting to more than $900 billion from 2009 through 2012. Even after accounting for legislation that the president signed that increased revenue during that period, President Obama has cut taxes by more than $850 billion in his first term, or approximately 1.5 percent of GDP.
Just recently, President Obama proposed another $250 billion in tax cuts designed to spur job creation, mostly in the form of additional cuts to the payroll tax. In fact, as the Citizens for Tax Justice noted, President Obama’s proposed payroll tax cuts are essentially equal in size to the total cost of the extended Bush tax cuts for 2012. If Congress passes this next set of Obama tax cuts, his total will rise to well more than $1.1 trillion, or nearly 2 percent of GDP—close to double the size of the tax cuts in President Bush’s first term.
