You want me to admit I’m wrong? I’m not sure who you’re arguing with.
Just to clear up the whole Fiscal year thing,
The Fiscal year starts in October and is named after the year in which it ends. So the Fiscal year 2009 started in October 2008 and ended in September 2009. Bush was responsible for TARP (he asked for it and signed it) and Obama was responsible for the Obama Stimulus (sort of, he just signed whatever Nancy put in front of him). Both laws applied to FY09.
Bush signed a continuing resolution lasting until mid March ‘09. (My thanks to Hun for providing the link that contradicted his post!) Obama signed the budget for the rest of the year through October of 2009.
The big budget buster in ‘09 was the failure of the economy. It caused a significant loss of revenue. 710B less than the CBO and Bush had projected in 2001 and 624B less than the previous year.
Who owns FY09? Both, IMHO. Obama clearly owns FY10 and FY11.
I don’t think people are arguing about what the graph says. It is detailed enough that several arguments can (and will) be made from it. To me, what it says is that there has been an accumulation of failures that got us here. The compromise we’ve seen over and over again in Washington is more Democratic spending and more tax cuts from the Republicans. It can’t continue for much longer.
We have two to five years to fix this mess. It may be too late for a Republican president to have much of an effect. We are adding 10% a year to the privately held debt which is up to 70% of GDP now. When it gets to 90%, the debt starts to increase by itself as investors willing to finance it start to walk away and interest rates rise. When it gets to 120%, it increases geometrically and the country ends.
(”This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of
Financial Crises” A 123 page pdf! http://www.nber.org/~wbuiter/cr1.pdf)
Who knows? Maybe in 2014 Hun and I will be camping out under the stars defending our garden.
Ok, now that's what I recall too, and the graph supports it.
People maybe, stuborn parrots, OTOH -- FromTheSidelines has been squawking about the alignment of the Bush timeline on that damn graph all day long whilst refusing to acknowledge the fundamental reality that BOTH sides own this mess.His assertion evidently rests upon the exclusion of W's TARP from the fiscal policy that obviously unfolded well into FY2009. Thank you for pointing out that error.
The country doesn't end -- the monetary/economic facade self-destructs and gets rebooted as it has numerous times in the country's history. The country goes on -- as happened circa 1819 and 1857, for example.