Exactly. He's cherry-picking just half the equation: per capita federal spending. One could just as easily cherry-pick the other half of the equation: just per capita federal taxes. But you and I don't need to cherry-pick that way, because the facts are on our side. We can include both halves of the equation and still make our point.
Sometimes I feel just a little sorry for conservatives, notwithstanding their moral disabilities. The degree of difficulty for them, in these kinds of facts-based debates, is just so damned much harder. For example, imagine I tried to make the case that Democratic presidents were better for the economy, overall. The facts are so strongly in favor of that statement that I could be lazy, careless, and even a bit random in selecting supporting evidence, and I could still build a strong case. I could post average GDP growth rates. Or stock market growth rates. Or median income growth rates. Or payroll jobs growth rates. Or change in deficits. Or any of dozens of other metrics. I could start my comparison with FDR. Or with Kennedy. I could assume no delay in policy effectiveness (counting a president's first year against his own numbers), or I could assume a slight delay (counting that first year against his predecessor). Although those kinds of choices could all make a difference in exactly how big the out-performance of Democratic eras was, in the end, nearly any reasonable analysis I could put together would show the same thing, so my job's very easy. When History itself is effectively on my side, my work doesn't require a lot of imagination.
Now, compare that to the task faced by a Republican trying to make the opposite point -- that Republican presidents are better for the economy. The degree of difficulty on that one is exponentially greater than mine. He can't just randomly rummage around for a few likely comparisons, crunch the numbers, post them, and be done with it. He needs to crunch the numbers many times in many different ways, throwing out the vast majority of results, because they don't support his theory. He will probably end up having to cherry-pick his era, carefully select a variety of assumptions (e.g., assuming a two or three year delay on policy effectiveness, depending on exactly how much delay best pretties up the numbers for him), throw out a few years that "don't count" for whatever reason (e.g., the growth of the economy during WWII and Vietnam doesn't count, because that was fueled by war), and still wind up inventing some sort of hybrid stats like the "misery index," in order to find something that helps him out. He has to work much, much harder and be vastly more imaginative than a liberal like me who merely needs to survey reality randomly and he's likely to hit on a strong argument. Or, more likely, the conservative needs to search the Internet for some think tank product that has already done the imaginative cherry-picking and trial-and-error number crunching for him, so he merely has to repost their propaganda.
