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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Robyn Blumner
President Barack Obama's budget has about as much chance of passing the Republican-controlled House
as a proclamation applauding
All this mud is getting thrown at the president's fiscal stewardship, and yet it was the last Republican president who teed up the current challenges. From the date that President George W. Bush took office in 2001 until he left in 2009, he took the surplus-rich federal budget handed to him by President Bill Clinton and turned it into a debt-bloated monster, adding
When Obama took office, Bush handed him an economy in ruins that was disgorging 500,000 jobs per month, as well as a government that could not live within its means.
By examining this year's budget deficit of a little over
Michael Linden, the director of tax and budget policy at the
But then something happened. By the time Obama took office in Jan. 2009, the CBO had changed its tune and was projecting a deficit of
Spending also increased in 2007 and 2008 primarily for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that Bush refused to pay for. All told, Linden finds that 35 percent of the differential between the CBO's 2007 estimates and the reality of 2012 was caused by events that preceded Obama's term.
The rest of the story -- fully 48 percent of the differential -- is one of sharply reduced revenues. When Obama moved into the
Of what remains, only 9 percent is attributable to higher-than-expected nondefense spending. Linden says most of that is recession-related, including the last of the stimulus dollars and extra demands on federal unemployment benefits.
What this proves is that Obama's new domestic spending is not driving up the country's deficit. Blame the wars and lack of revenues, policies written in stone before Obama took office. Had the Bush tax cuts never gone into effect, the national debt would be about
Obama's critics are attacking him because he failed to meet his early promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. These are the same folks who hamstrung the president's efforts by refusing to increase revenues, even by closing tax loopholes for oil companies. And let us not forget these immortal words from Bush in a February 2001 joint session of
Oops.
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National Deficit Result of Wars and Bush Tax Cuts | Politics
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