Let’s explode one of President Obama’s most egregious bits of nonsense concerning his profligate spending – the whole I-inherited-this-mess business. This is better known as the Blame Bush Defense. As Obama so helpfully explains, the day he walked into the Oval Office he was facing $1 trillion deficits as far as the eye could see, and there was nothing he could do about it. It was all George W. Bush’s fault.
Balderdash.
It is true that Bush did not restrain the out-of-control spending of the Republican Congress during his years in office, as he should have. And it’s true that the deficit when Obama took office exceeded $1 trillion.
But that was true one time only, because of what was supposed to be a one-time emergency provision – a provision Obama voted for as a senator. It was not a long-term trend, until Obama made it one.
Bush did not inherit a surplus from Bill Clinton, as Democrats like to say, but the deficit during Bush’s first year in office was only $144.5 billion. After 9/11, the start of the Iraq War and the continued upward trajectory of legally mandated entitlement spending – along with the many earmarks and domestic program increases so loved by the GOP Congress, the deficit ballooned over the next several years, topping out at a record $605 billion, or 5.3 percent of GDP, in 2004.
But as economic growth set in, largely as a result of the Bush tax cuts, the deficit began to decline, falling to only $459 billion, or 3.4 percent of GDP, in 2007. The deficit was on a similar downward trajectory in 2008 when the mortgage market melted down in September, leading to the massive bailout spending that exploded the deficit to just over $1 trillion.
Yes, that was the deficit that Obama “inherited.” But the TARP bailout, which Obama voted for, was initiated as a one-time emergency measure. It was not established as part of the year-to-year budget baseline. The deficit rose to over $1.35 trillion in 2009 because of Obama’s massive “stimulus” bill, which was sold as the only way to keep unemployment under 8 percent, which of course it did not do.
Now Obama proposes to spend $3.8 trillion in 2010, with a deficit of $1.6 trillion. Why? Are we passing another $787 billion stimulus bill? Are we doing TARP all over again?
George W. Bush did not establish this kind of spending as permanent parts of the federal budget. Barack Obama did.
If Obama was serious about spending discipline, he would have treated the one-time TARP emergency expenditure as just that – a one-time thing. He would not have larded a $787 billion pork barrel boondoggle onto the following year’s budget. And he wouldn’t have come back this year and proposed a budget even bigger.
He would have put a stop to such spending and started to get control of all discretionary spending, then went to work reforming entitlements.
He isn’t doing any of this. Whatever he may have inherited, he is making the choice to make it worse. Much, much worse.
Someone needs to tell President Obama: If you think President Bush spent too much, then put a stop to it.
But he doesn’t want to stop. He wants to spend, even as he tells you he is taking deficits seriously. He is taking nothing seriously, and he’s simply hoping you’ll keep believing that George W. Bush, safely retired to Crawford, Texas, is forcing him to spend all these trillions.
Nothing that’s happening today is Bush’s responsibility. It’s all Obama’s. Every penny of it.
