Posted by jvford on 9/4/2012 7:55:00 AM (view original):
Posted by tecwrg on 9/4/2012 7:33:00 AM (view original):
Posted by antoncresten on 9/4/2012 6:54:00 AM (view original):
Then why has the deficit grown by nearly $5b in less than four years?
You really don't know the answer to that question? (And it's trillion, not billion)
Of course. This is an easy one.
We are growing the deficit simply due to not taxing enough. It really isn't a spending problem.
SS really isn't going bankrupt. Funding for Medicare is actually booming. We just need more tax revenue.
Nutting also ignored costs associated with the auto bailout and any FY 2009 stimulus spending.
Add it all up, and it's preposterous to claim the $3.52 trillion in spending in FY 2009 was all Bush's fault and that Obama's budget clock should start ticking on October 1, 2009.
Also of note is that programs such as TARP and the stimulus package were sold to the American people as emergency spending that wouldn't be recurring.
As the last budget agreed upon by the executive and legislative branches prior to the financial crisis projected spending of $3.1 trillion, that's the baseline from which new budgets should operate adjusted for inflation.
Unfortunately as we conservatives correctly predicted at the time, this wouldn't end up being the case, and the new baseline would be what was finally spent in 2009.
As such, while the President and his shills in the media celebrate what they claim to be "flat spending" in Obama's first term, the FY 2013 budget projects outlays $700 billion greater than the last budget before the financial crisis, a 23 percent increase.
If that's what these folks call "flat," we're all in a lot of trouble.
But this is clearly the goal: to revise history before the election to manipulate the public into thinking that spending hasn't gone up under Obama.
Like everything else, it's all Bush's fault!
Furthermore, Bush's spending stopped in Jan 2009, yet they credit all of Nobamas initial spending to Bush:
Obama didn't come in and live with the budget Bush had approved. He immediately signed off on enormous spending programs that had been specifically rejected by Bush. This included a $410 billion spending bill that Bush had refused to sign before he left office. Obama signed it on March 10, 2009. Bush had been chopping brush in Texas for two months at that point. Marketwatch's Nutting says that's Bush's spending.
Obama also spent the second half of the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP). These were discretionary funds meant to prevent a market meltdown after Lehman Brothers collapsed. By the end of 2008, it was clear the panic had passed, and Bush announced that he wouldn't need to spend the second half of the TARP money.
But on Jan. 12, 2009, Obama asked Bush to release the remaining TARP funds for Obama to spend as soon as he took office. By Oct. 1, Obama had spent another $200 billion in TARP money. That, too, gets credited to Bush, according to the creative accounting of Rex Nutting.