Lies, damn lies, and the 'Y' axis

Alexander Hart catches the GOP's "Pledge" in some serious chart-based trickery. Here's their graph showing that President Obama has exploded the size of the government:

Looking at the chart, Obama seems to have slightly more than doubled the size of the government. But notice the numbers on the left: The "Y" axis begins at 17 percent. Here's what it looks like if it begins, as it should, at 0:

Three pages later, the document complains that "Americans have lost trust with their government." I wonder why?

Update: Commenters noted that Alex's graph brought the Y axis to 100, when the data only went up to the low-20s. That also isn't a very honest way of presenting the data, they said, and they're right. I should've looked at it more carefully. Here's how I'd make the graph:

You're dealing with about a 3.5 percentage point increase in the size of the government as a percentage of the economy -- at least on the graph. More precisely, government was 20.8 percent of the economy in Bush's final year and is projected to settle at about 22.8 percent in 2013, 2014, and 2015. So there's been an increase, but not a doubling.