Obama's unprecedented accomplishment is now official

[_bcspace]

Obama's Now Added $6 Trillion to the National Debt

[_Kevin Graham]

It was also a "historic achievement" under Reagan. The difference being of course, is that the debt skyrocketed under Reagan, because of Reagan. It tripled in fact (300% increase). It practically doubled again under Bush (190% increase). But we're supposed to freak out because it rose 60% while Obama was President?

This isn't rocket science, but it is arithmetic. We know why the debt went up $5.4 trillion during Obama, and almost all of it had absolutely nothing to do with him.

GOP Debunked: Obama did not create $5 trillion in new debt

And,

Is Obama responsible for a $5 trillion increase in the debt?

I'll go ahead and pose this challenge to bcspace and anyone else here who thinks they can show us how Obama spent "$6 trillion" the past four years.Here is the only resource you'll need.

[_Kevin Graham]

We've spent roughly $800 billion on Iraq/Afghanistan since 2008. Remember those wars we were already in, long before Obama came to office? Yeah, he was stuck with cleaning up Bush's mess. So there's nearly a trillion right there.

And thanks to the outrageous debt incurred by his predecessors, over $1.4 trillion has been paid on interest payments. So let's just go ahead and say $2.2 trillion based on these two expenses alone.

Now let's look at Social Security and how payouts have been jacked up due to retiring baby boomers. During Bush's eight years, payouts for Social Security ran between $560-630 billion per year. However, in the last four years under Obama, payments have been between $700-770 billion. So you figure an extra $200 billion a year over four years, we're talking at least an extra $800 billion in mandatory spending that is beyond Obama's control. So now we're up to $3 trillion.

And then there is Medicare. As was the case with Social Security, payouts have gone way up as well. They were between $200 and $300 billion until George Bush passed his ridiculous Medicare Part D legislation, allowing drug companies to charge whatever they wanted for prescription drugs and then expecting the taxpayer to just pay it without any negotiating power whatsoever. So thanks to Bush, the annual cost to taxpayers increased every year and then skyrocketed to $400 billion during his final year in office. But since Obama, that figure has rising to a staggering $450-$500 billion. So in 4-5 years that's at least an extra $1 trillion more that the government has had to spend under Obama, due to no fault of his own. So now we're talking around $4 trillion of expenditures that was completely out of Obama's control. We'll go ahead and get the Recovery act out of the way and add another $800 billion, even though only $550 billion of that was in actual spending. The rest came in the form of tax breaks which added to the deficit.

So we're at $4.8 trillion, with only 10% of it being directly attributable to Obama "spending".

So how do we account for that extra deficit gap of $1 trillion?

Well, since decreased revenues add to the deficit/debt just the same as increased spending, we have to figure out who is to blame for lost revenues. Thanks to an inherited recession, revenues from corporate taxes came in between $141-190 billion during Obama's first three years. Compare this to the $340-390 billion during Bush's last three years. That's at least an annual difference of $200 billion. So over the first three years we lost roughly $600 billion in revenues, which just adds to the debt.

But that doesn't count personal income taxes, which also took a hit. During Bush's last four years revenues from personal income taxes were between $1-1.2 trillion. During Obama's first three years revenues dropped dramatically between $899-950 billion. So at the very least we're talking another $300 billion in lost revenues over his first three years, again due to no fault of his own.

And to make the revenue problem even worse, Obama implemented his own tax cuts that benefited the working class. I don't know how much that added to the deficit but we could probably assume another hundred billion isn't out of the question. It is funny that the biggest problem with Obama adding to the debt comes from his willingness to cut taxes further. But Republicans love that, right? I mean he is now trying to increase revenues again but the Republicans in Congress so hell no!

So my question is, where is the evidence that Obama "added $6 trillion" to the debt?

[_Droopy]

It was also a "historic achievement" under Reagan. The difference being of course, is that the debt skyrocketed under Reagan, because of Reagan. It tripled in fact (300% increase). It practically doubled again under Bush (190% increase). But we're supposed to freak out because it rose 60% while Obama was President?

This isn't rocket science, but it is arithmetic. We know why the debt went up $5.4 trillion during Obama, and almost all of it had absolutely nothing to do with him.

GOP Debunked: Obama did not create $5 trillion in new debt

And,

Is Obama responsible for a $5 trillion increase in the debt?

I'll go ahead and pose this challenge to bcspace and anyone else here who thinks they can show us how Obama spent "$6 trillion" the past four years.Here is the only resource you'll need.

Keep telling the Goebblesque lies, Kevin. Tell them and tell them and tell them and tell them until you're too dizzy to stand up. You keep returning, over and over again to the same long-discredited leftist agitprop who's ashes we've already scattered.

Bow, chant, and count your Obama prayer beads in an ecstasy of devotion until all the facts, evidence, logic, and capacity for rational thought have been thoroughly purged from your consciousness.

Obama doubled the national debt in just a little over three years, a feat it took Bush and two congresses 8 years to do.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Sorry Kevin, you lose again. Those polices came about in the early 2000nds, and annual deficits were from between $160 billion to $450 billion all the way through 2008. Move to 2009. Suddenly, we see a $1.4 trillion deficit. How did George Bush's policies from the last decade suddenly balloon from a high of $450 billion to $1.4 trillion, and then continue in this manner to the present, where we are now past $6 trillion in new national debt?

Yeah, that's right, this all, save for one thing you can point to, the first stimulus, signed by Bush and implemented under Obama, represents new borrowing and spending at an unprecedented pace. Obama has already increased the national debt 60% of the $10 trillion he inherited. You cannot lie your way out, around, or under the empirical facts. The claim that Obama is the most modest spending president of recent decades is a pure fabrication - yet another clever statistical trick that, upon closer inspection, evaporates. The tricks employed are fairly straight forward: utilize only publicly held debt and not gross debt, make absolute mathematical comparisons without consideration of time in office or the state of the economy in difference decades etc.

Obama can be made to look modest until these other variables are taken into consideration, and then what is obvious becomes explicit: borrowing and spending exploded to unprecedented levels in just three to four years under Obama. The absolute numbers are their, so there's really not need to hem and haw over it.

Obama blows all his recent predecessors into low orbit:



Any five-year-old could be expected to "get it" here. Yup, the vertical climber of the graph is similar for Obama as for Bush, but look at the numbers: over 6.3 trillion, much of which was generated in only three to four years. Bush is gone. Bush has been out of office since 2008.

Even some major elements within the mainstream Left are intelligent and honest enough to do the simply math and dispense with the torturous sophistries necessary to defend The One:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2 ... s/1830363/

Bush added $700 million to the deficit by 2008? Yup, and Obama pumped in another trillion. Then another, then another, and then more. Now, moving toward $7 trillion in debt, Obama and his lemming hordes are still campaigning against the last President, now out of office for half a decade.

As to where the 6 trillion in new phantom money went, please do tell, Kevin.

Inquiring minds would like to know. Perhaps this is a beginning:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/traceygreen ... -reported/

[_Droopy]

You know, the few conservatives still prowling around these haunts, even though we have to spank Kevin now and then and send him to bed without dinner, have never presented themselves as the partisan hacks that Kevin claims them to be, and as he himself behaves on a regular basis.

I've been quite clear on many occasions that Bush, far from a conservative, was a tax-and-borrow-and-spend statist Rhino Republican who, while he shares none of the blame for the economic meltdown per se, shares blame for the stealing of our children's and their children's grandchildren economic future from them. Graham's hackneyed agitprop, regurgitated from the standard leftist spin conveyor belts, aren't even intellectually serious enough, for the most part, to warrant any further commentary. The only thing that drives me to bother with them at all are their sheer audacity in the face of easily ascertained facts.

So then, Bush was a reckless spender, and the Republican congress under him even worse. Obama has massively intensified the rate of spending, borrowing, and debt creation. At the end of the day, however, after all the finger-pointing is over, this core reality remains: these growth curves in debt and government spending are exponential, and they are unsustainable. They will, if continued, eventually provoke a catastrophic economic collapse. All the phantom stimulus money, all the trillion dollar coins, all the imaginary paper is going to come crashing down upon our heads, both those who wailed and clamored for their share of the booty and/or their fellow citizens property and those who believe in, what are in essence, gospel principles of economic life (industry, thrift, savings, investment, provident living, and economic self-sufficiency).

It looks, at this point, like there's no stopping this runaway train. The overwhelming and collapsing of the system is precisely the Cloward/Piven/Alinsky strategy of revolution from within the system that Obama was nurtured upon and took as his model of political activism decades ago. That's why there's no compromising with him, no middle ground, no quarter given, and no moderation or tolerance for dissenting views within his administration. This is the plan. Obama is a purist ideologue, not a statesman. One agrees with him, or one is a heretic.

Once the American economy really bottoms out, we're going to be in for some very interesting times indeed.

[_Kevin Graham]

Lies? It is basic math you idiot. Go ahead and add up the extra "$6 trillion" that Obama allegedly spent. You can't do it and bcspace can't do it. You can't even come close to it.

I just went through step by step the largest increases to the debt during Obama's tenure and you cannot challenge a single one. Every single one of them were out of his control. And now you're trying to deflect from these fact by throwing up an chart by Heritage that highlights the "debt limit increases," as if the two were synonymous.

The fact is the debt tripled (300%) under your icon, Ronald Reagan, and then doubled again (190%) under Bush. The debt has only risen roughly 60% under Obama and the largest factors adding to the debt have absolutely nothing to do with him. They were factors set in motion long before he came to office. You should look up the difference between discretionary and mandatory spending and then do a basic research on how mandatory spending has gone up.

[_Kevin Graham]

Bush added $700 million to the deficit by 2008? Yup, and Obama pumped in another trillion.

This was already refuted by one of your own sources, CATO.

http://www.cato.org/blog/dont-blame-oba ... 09-deficit

The FYI 2009 was already decided in October 2008, months before Obama stepped into office.

The Recovery act was all Obama but only $550 billion of that was in spending. The rest tax cuts. So as I said, it accounts for only 10% of the increased debt since Jan 2009. Where does the rest come from? I've already explained it and you've done nothing but quote your favorite think tanks who don't even come close to refuting anything I've said. The debt ceiling and the debt are not the same thing. The budget control act didn't add to the debt. The debt is going up due to all kinds of mandatory expenditures that are reaching record levels due to factors that have nothing to do with Obama. Period. No amount of whining is going to change that.

[_Droopy]

Bush added $700 million to the deficit by 2008? Yup, and Obama pumped in another trillion.

This was already refuted by one of your own sources, CATO.

http://www.cato.org/blog/dont-blame-oba ... 09-deficit

The FYI 2009 was already decided in October 2008, months before Obama stepped into office.

The Recovery act was all Obama but only $550 billion of that was in spending. The rest tax cuts. So as I said, it accounts for only 10% of the increased debt since Jan 2009. Where does the rest come from? I've already explained it and you've done nothing hyperlink your favorite think tanks who don't even come close to refuting anything I've said.

1. There were no actual"tax cuts" save for the short-lived and economically, almost purely symbolic $116 billion payroll tax cut that simulated no new economic activity and then expired. I've dismantled this mendacious sophistry time and again and yet, like Freddy Kruger, it always comes back.

Once again, the tiny payroll tax cuts only represented $116 billion, and were ephemeral, the "payroll holiday" expiring by legislative design. The rest of these tax "cuts" were not actual tax "cuts" at all but disguised wealth transfers ("refundable" tax credits) of which there were seven. All but one were "refundable," which is Washington-speak for the fact that one can receive them without actually having any tax liability at all.

As to 2009, I'll go so far as to allow Bush and Obama to share responsibility for the first stimulus, which Bush signed and Obama helped implement without complaint. However, on the record, that's as far as that dog and pony show can be allowed to go. Obama himself was up to his ears in the skyrocketing spending that began in 2009. The Democrats were pretty certain Obama was going to take the election in 2008, and so passed just three of twelve 2009 appropriations bills. After Obama won the election and the Democrats swept the House as well, the Democratic-controlled Congress passed the other nine appropriations bills, which were then signed by Obama. Obama was a conductor on the runaway spending train, along with his party and Bush, but we've still got at least $5.3 Trillion of fiat money created and spent since Obama took office to account for even if the first stimulus is taken out of Obama's side of the ledger entirely.

As to CATO, you still, after all this time, apparently haven't read your own source. This is something else that was long ago dead and buried that you keep exhuming in your endless binge/purge cycle. I have never disagreed with CATO or anybody else that Bush was a reckless and irresponsible spender. However, let's take a look at the actual essay, which is a scathing rebuke of Obama's entire economic program:

Some critics are lambasting President Obama for record deficits. This is not a productive line of attack, largely because it puts the focus on the wrong variable. America’s fiscal problem is excessive government spending, and deficits are merely a symptom of that underlying disease. Moreover, if deficits are perceived as the problem, that means both spending restraint and higher taxes are solutions. The political class, needless to say, will choose the latter approach 99 percent of the time. A higher tax burden, however, simply means that debt-financed spending is replaced by tax-financed spending, which is akin to jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, or vice-versa.

In addition to being theoretically misguided, critics sometimes blame Obama for things that are not his fault. Listening to a talk radio program yesterday, the host asserted that Obama tripled the budget deficit in his first year. This assertion is understandable, since the deficit jumped from about $450 billion in 2008 to $1.4 trillion in 2009. As this chart illustrates, with the Bush years in green, it appears as if Obama’s policies have led to an explosion of debt.

But there is one rather important detail that makes a big difference. The chart is based on the assumption that the current administration should be blamed for the 2009 fiscal year. While this makes sense to a casual observer, it is largely untrue. The 2009 fiscal year began October 1, 2008, nearly four months before Obama took office. The budget for the entire fiscal year was largely set in place while Bush was in the White House. So is we update the chart to show the Bush fiscal years in green, we can see that Obama is partly right in claiming that he inherited a mess (though Obama actually deserves a small share of the blame for Bush’s last deficit since earlier this year he pushed through both an “omnibus” spending bill and the so-called stimulus bill that increased FY2009 spending).

It should go without saying that this post is not an argument for Obama’s fiscal policy. The current President promised change, but he is continuing the wasteful and profligate policies of his big-spending predecessor. That is where critics should be focusing their attention.

As pointed out above, however, this misses some aspects of Obama's actual addition to the spending explosion of 2009, through his signing of a plethora of Democrat spending bills that the Republicans had no power to stop. In all, its a classic conservative/libertarian critique of Democrat economic policies: the problem is out of control spending, fiat money creation, rampant taxation, and credit manipulation. Further, Obama supported the Bush stimulus. His second, much larger $831 billion stimulus, was just a larger version of Bush's.

In any case, you just attacked CATO in another thread as a waste of intellectual time, along with anyone else who yanks your crypto-communist leash, so there's no need in trying to pretend that you trot out whatever you think will score debating points when you have nothing else to bring to the table, and then turn and rend your own sources when they rain on your Romper Room socialist parade.

[_Kevin Graham]

There were no actual"tax cuts" save for the short-lived and economically, almost purely symbolic $116 billion payroll tax cut that simulated no new economic activity and then expired. I've dismantled this mendacious sophistry time and again and yet, like Freddy Kruger, it always comes back.

This is the first time I remember you ever speaking about this, though I'll admit your ignorance remains a repeated, eternal constant. The tax changes accounted for $288 billion you moron:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_R ... billion.29

The fact that you think it only involved a modest payroll tax is telling.

Obama himself was up to his ears in the skyrocketing spending that began in 2009

Are you prepared to give examples? Stop yapping and start producing.

As to CATO, you still, after all this time, apparently haven't read your own source. This is something else that was long ago dead and buried that you keep exhuming in your endless binge/purge cycle

It isn't dead because idiots like you keep maintaining that Obama was responsible for a $1.4 trillion deficit and you use it to compare to Bush's "last year" as 2008. Bush's last year is actually 2009 as far as the fiscal year is concerned. You wouldn't accept that even after I quoted one of your favorite sources. This point is important because it proves what Obama inherited. You on the other hand keep forking out misleading charts and figures that give the impression that government spending went out of control because of Obama. Again, the debt tripled under Reagan and doubled under Bush. You still haven't responded to these facts because it disrupts your worldview. Better to just ignore them, and hope to wow us with rhetoric, right?

I have never disagreed with CATO or anybody else that Bush was a reckless and irresponsible spender.

The first time I provided that article was because you attributed to Obama a $1.4 trillion deficit. CATO disagreed with you.

As pointed out above, however, this misses some aspects of Obama's actual addition to the spending explosion of 2009, through his signing of a plethora of Democrat spending bills that the Republicans had no power to stop.

So name them! Show how they add to the existing debt and stop bluffing. I've asked you three times now and you still cannot produce. What's the matter, you haven't found a Heritage/CATO piece to do your thinking for you on that point?

[_Droopy]

Lies? It is basic math you idiot. Go ahead and add up the extra "$6 trillion" that Obama allegedly spent. You can't do it and bcspace can't do it. You can't even come close to it.

Here's the math:

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Spin away, Maestro. Bush left us with a bit over $10 trillion. It now stands at about $16.3. Bush's stimulus, which Obama supported and helped spend, was $787 billion. Let's make it a trillion. Alright, that leaves, including the large Democratic spending bills Obama signed in 2009, something in the area of $5 trillion dollars of fiat money, all created and disbursed since Obama has elected and to which Bush has no possible relation.

Explain.