As a candidate for president, Barack Obama decried the financial toll that the Iraq war was taking on the economy, but Obama’s proposed spending on welfare through 2010 will eclipse Bush’s war spending by more than $260 billion. “Because of the Bush-McCain policies, our debt has ballooned,” then-Sen. Barack Obama told a Charleston, W.V., crowd in March 2008. “This is creating problems in our fragile economy. And that kind of debt also places an unfair burden on our children and grandchildren, who will have to repay it.”
During the entire administration of George W. Bush, the Iraq war cost a total of $622 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.
President Obama’s welfare spending will reach $888 billion in a single fiscal year–2010–more than the Bush administration spent on war in Iraq from the first “shock and awe” attack in 2003 until Bush left office in January.
