Posted on 02/20/2018 5:55:06 AM PST by Kaslin
Congressional Republicans have been raked over the coals in the last two weeks for slamming through budget caps and inflating government spending and debt by another $300 billion. The criticisms are well-deserved. It's a historical truism that Republicans are much more fiscally conscientious when they are in the minority than when they run Congress. And Republicans tend to be much bigger fiscal hawks when there is a Democratic president than a Republican president -- as we are now witnessing.
The only time in half a century that the budget has been balanced was in the late 1990s, when Bill Clinton was president and the Republicans ran Congress. It was a good combination. We ran four straight budget surpluses from 1998 to 2001, and government spending dropped gloriously, from about 20 percent of GDP to 17.6 percent. No wonder the economy boomed in those years. Government was less of a drag.
But now we are experiencing a historical revisionism -- based on fantasy, not fact -- about the fiscal record during the slow-growth Obama years. Amazingly, Barack Obama is being heralded as a deficit slayer who helped get our fiscal house in order. What's next? Richard Nixon was really a pussycat?
Obama and his supporters are saying that he "cut the deficit by two-thirds" while president. The left-wing group Politifact, which is supposed to be a fact-checker, even has rated Obama's claim as "mostly true." Last week, while I was talking about the fiscal outlook on CNN, the producers put a chart on the screen showing that the deficit dropped by 60 percent while Obama was president.
My jaw dropped -- literally -- when I saw the chart. This takes data torturing to new heights. The national debt skyrocketed from $11 trillion to nearly $20 trillion on Obama's watch. Is a diet successful if you start by weighing 200 pounds and eight years later you weigh 400 pounds? Would anyone in that position say, "I may be obese now, but at least I'm putting on the pounds at a slower pace"?
The national debt nearly doubled in eight years, which makes Obama the runaway Olympic gold medalist for fiscal incompetence. On this score Obama's record is by far the worst of any modern president.
So where does this fantasy come from that Obama lowered the deficit by 60 percent? Here are the official deficit amounts (in billions of dollars) in George W. Bush's last year in office and Obama's eight years in office:
2008 -- 459
2009 -- 1,413
2010 -- 1,294
2011 -- 1,300
2012 -- 1,087
2013 -- 680
2014 -- 485
2015 -- 438
2016 -- 585
Here is some simple math for the Obama worshippers: $585 billion, the deficit at the end of the Obama presidency, is higher than $459 billion, the deficit at the beginning of the Obama presidency.
The left comes up with a different answer by dishonestly starting Obama's deficit meter in 2010, after he passed the fiscal stimulus bill, an $800 billion debt bomb. So they assigned the gargantuan deficit in Obama's first year to Bush. It is true that we were four months into fiscal year 2009 when Obama was sworn into office. And it is true that the deficit was going to be much higher no matter what Obama did in his first year because of the deep recession that ended in June 2009. So in fairness, some of the large deficit in 2009 was Bush's fault.
But Obama made the deficit hundreds of billions of dollars worse with a stimulus plan that by the administration's own admission didn't create a single new job. The number of jobs in 2009, 2010 and 2011 was lower than Obama's economists predicted we would get if we had done nothing and not wasted $800 billion.
Obama's failed presidency is being falsely lionized in other ways, as well. The new spin from the left is that Obama saved the U.S. from a second Great Depression, when in fact he gave America the weakest recovery from a recession since the Great Depression. He also left Donald Trump with an economy that was crawling at 1.6 percent -- which is why many people thought we were headed into another recession.
No one thinks that today. If the latest Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta projections are right, we will have growth of 3.2 percent in the first quarter of this year, and we will have averaged 3 percent for the past year. This is almost twice the growth rate Trump inherited, and that number, ladies and gentlemen, is not fantasy; it is fact.
Yes, Obama stepped on the gas and really ramped up the deficit. But suggesting that Obama is the main culprit is a mistake. Republicans gave up on spending restraint 20 years ago. Bush gave it lip service every once in a while but spent like a drunken sailor on his “Compassionate Conservative” programs. Today’s “Republican” Congress doesn’t even give it lip service. No one cares about the deficit anymore. And it isn’t a “deficit” issue. That is media misdirection. Tax revenues are higher than they’ve ever been. Its a SPENDING issue.
Let’s not let McConnell and Trump get away with spending.
The only time in half a century that the budget has been balanced was in the late 1990s, when Bill Clinton was president and the Republicans ran Congress
Even this is a LIE!!! The Budget has GROWN every single year since Calvin Coolidge was President, if it was “balanced” there would NOT be an increase, but there was. Look it Up!
We’ll be at 30 trillion in my lifetime. There is no going back.
I know we all like to dump all of this on Obama, but this all go a huge kickstart under Bush to pay for his invasion of Iraq, to pay off friends and buy off the opposition. The deep state went viral under GWB. That their appetite continued to grow under Obama is no surprise, but don’t let Bush off the hook for this mess.
“...There is no going back.”
Exactly, the debt will NEVER be paid back. Impossible. The only thing that could have a major impact is devaluing the dollar and that won’t happen either so here we are....the credit card is overflowing and will just keep going.
Hope we all enjoy the ride up because the ride down is going to be ....
I can not think of the right word. Scary, rough, deadly, world ending? Just do not know.
I am not an economist but even I know that there are “laws” that govern economies even if we do not know those laws are (and I do not believe one person on earth really know and understands them).
So one of two things is going to happen (the when is an unknown factor)
1) Things continue as they are forever.
2) The house of cards our elite politicians is building will collapse taking the world’s economy with it. (Since many nations have their economies tied closely to ours we fail, they fail).
But then, this is just my opinion and as always I may be wrong.
“...Yes, Obama stepped on the gas and really ramped up the deficit....”
This America-hating Marxist did EVERYTHING he could to hurt the American economy. We hope the IDIOTS that voted for him are proud of themselves. They were warned but did not want to hear it.
Guess how many years at the rate of $1 per second, it would take to pay back just the first Trillion? Give up? 33,000+ years, real years, 12 months 365 days, do the math, it is depressing.
BOTH parties are responsible for the Kenyanesian Usurpation.
Obama could not have usurped the office to which he was ineligible without their complete cooperation.
Still pimping act that lie. We didn't have a surplus, and we didn't balance the budget.
The royal idot is the poster child of proof that education doesn’t always take.
Not as a percent of GDP which is what counts. The following graph is based on numbers from the most recent U.S. Budget:
The numbers are at http://www.econdataus.com/recsrc19.html. As can be seen, revenues are now down to 17.3 percent of GDP and are projected to go down to 16.3 percent of GDP in two years. Except for the during recessions following the 2001 tech crash and 2008 financial crisis, this will be the lowest level since 1959.
Agreed. It's hard to judge Obama because he was handed a once-in-a-generation financial crisis. Bush, on the other hand, was handed a once-in-a-generation surplus and arguably squandered it on the ill-advised war in Iraq. Perhaps the surplus was based on a bubble in tech, perhaps not. But as the following graph shows, we did indeed have a surplus:
The numbers are at http://www.econdataus.com/def19.html. As can be seen, the Gross Deficit (the change in the Gross Federal Debt) never quite turned positive but the Unified Deficit did. Now, even the Unified Deficit is set to hit nearly a trillion dollars per year for each of the next five years.
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