NYT: Obama's Responsibility for the Deficit versus Bush's

by Maggie Temple-Smith | Once upon a time, when Bill Clinton was leaving office, there was a budget surplus.  What happened to it?  David Leonhardt at The New York Times cites four main factors:  "the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama."  (New York Times)  Leonhardt explains here how they crunched the deficit numbers. 

Jonathan Singer:  "While the "deficit hawks" within the Republican Party are all up in arms...about proposed spending on healthcare, education, energy, etc. -- that is to say the agenda Barack Obama ran and won on in 2008 -- this platform makes up about 3 cents out of every dollar in deficit spending."

Setting aside for the moment Obama's responsibility for failing in six months to fix the deficit, Jack Balkin has a chart drawn from the article, showing exactly how the Bush administration contrived to drive the country's over the cliff. 

It would be one thing if these expenditures were a matter of national necessity that ultimately made the country better off. But they were not. The Bush tax cuts were primarily targeted to benefit the wealthiest Americans, and exacerbated a growing inequality of wealth in the United States. The Iraq War was a war of choice, justified by false claims of weapons of mass destruction and insinuations of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. It proved to be a foreign policy disaster and an enormous waste of money which we must still shoulder. Deregulatory financial policies were unwise and unsound and helped push us toward the current Great Recession.

All in all, it is one of the most remarkable displays of ineptitude, greed, and corruption in American history. And now that they have run the country into the ground, President Bush's party, now thankfully out of power, is blaming the party that succeeded them, the Democrats, for the baleful effects of deficit spending. Colossal ineptitude is being followed by equally colossal chutzpah.  (emphasis added)

So how is Obama now responsible?  Leonhardt further writes:

Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of a widely cited study on the dangers of the current deficits, describes the situation like so: “Bush behaved incredibly irresponsibly for eight years. On the one hand, it might seem unfair for people to blame Obama for not fixing it. On the other hand, he’s not fixing it.”

“And,” he added, “not fixing it is, in a sense, making it worse.” (More at New York Times)

Sure it is...in a sense.

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast points out that Republicans don't have any better ideas than Obama on how to save us from drowning in Bush's legacy of red ink.

George W. Bush cut taxes for the wealthy time and time again, and unemployment exploded under his tax policies. So can we please stop this "rich people create jobs" nonsense? They had eight years of paying ever less taxes and instead of creating jobs, they created bonuses for themselves.

As for spending cuts, let's see Republicans come up with a realistic plan to eliminate the deficit. Elminiate Social Security and Medicare? Go ahead. Propose it. See how far you get, especially among families where one or both breadwinners are unemployed, the savings account they set up for the kids' college has been decimated by the economic crash and their parents have lost most of their retirement savings at the same time.

Tell these families that their elderly parents now have to pay all their medical expenses on their own. Then if the other breadwinner loses his or her job, and they start sliding down into poverty, tell them there's no more SCHIP. No more food stamps. No more job retraining. Nothing for them, because "deficit reduction is the only important thing." See how that will fly.

Amen.

More at Memeorandum.....

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