Obama's unprecedented accomplishment is now official

[_Kevin Graham]

Bush's stimulus, which Obama supported and helped spend, was $787 billion

Your ignorance is astounding. After all of the money that has been paid back from TARP, the CBO recently estimated that the overall tally for taxpayers amounts to a whopping $24 billion and that number keeps getting smaller.

So you just invented $760 billion of debt that doesn't exist.

Let's make it a trillion

LOL! Just invent another $240 billion? Why not! You see, why deal with actual math and real numbers when we can just make them up as we go along? You deal in Right Wing fantasy land while I'm dealing in reality. I'm citing your own sources for God's sake. The link above is to Forbes!

all right, 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.

Why don't you go ahead and name these "spending bills" that distributed "something in the area of $5 trillion." They don't exist. You are really so stupid that you think you're going to just get away with making crap up and expecting us to go along with it.
LOL!

That debt clock is cute but it only tells us what the debt is. It doesn't tell us how the debt rose by $5.4 trillion since 2009. That's your job now. I've already accounted for the increased debt with detailed examples, and you ignored it all. You're afraid of the facts. All you know how to do is keep asserting over and over, like a broken record, that Obama spent all the money!!

So I'm giving you the chance to do the math and this is the fourth time you've refused.

What's the matter Droopy, afraid the math won't support your daft conclusions?

Then there is a good reason to be afraid.

[_Kevin Graham]

To give our audience just some idea how mathematically challenged you are. These are three comments you've made tonight:

1. "Bush left us with a bit over $10 trillion. It now stands at about $16.3."
2. "Obama doubled the national debt in just a little over three years"
3. "Obama has already increased the national debt 60% of the $10 trillion he inherited."

WTF?

I'll leave it to those with at least a grade school education to figure out which remark doesn't go with the other two. Seriously Droopy, you're just throwing around numbers without making any sense.

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

So? How does that change the fact that Obama has still had to pay for them? Deficits add to the debt, or didn't you know that? The issue here is the debt and why it is +$6 trillion over the past four years. Neglecting to account for expenditures on two wars while pretending to discuss the debt intellectually, is just idiotic. Besides, Bush financed the wars "off the books" but were eventually calculated when Obama took office.

For two years Obama was financially committed to both of them and is still paying for Afghanistan. Your argument that the wars created a smaller deficit under Bush than they do under Obama is a "no crap" remark, and easily explained by the difference in revenues. Obama inherited a recession, remember that.

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?

Have you been living under a rock? I mean you really don't know?

You cannot lie your way out, around, or under the empirical facts.

What lie? What facts? You're beginning to rant again. Stay on topic and this will all be over soon. I promise to make it as painless as I can, but you're just a glutton for punishment when you start trying to do math.

The claim that Obama is the most modest spending president of recent decades is a pure fabrication

Who made that claim? The only similar claim I'm aware of is that the rate of government spending is relatively low, which is true.

yet another clever statistical trick that, upon closer inspection, evaporates.

Why are you still focused on something that has nothing to do with this thread? Oh, that's right. You've been asked to provide detailed analysis of the $5.4 trillion debt, and so you're trying to change the subject to avoid having to do that!

Any five-year-old could be expected to "get it" here.

So why can't you? You're posting a chart about the increase in "debt ceiling" which has nothing to do with rate of increased debt. The debt ceiling doesn't go up every time the debt goes up, it only goes up when the debt reaches the ceiling. Five-year olds indeed!

Bush is gone. Bush has been out of office since 2008.

And the effects of his traumatic recession remain. The effects of his ridiculous Medicare D remains. The effects of retiring baby boomers remain. Again, you don't understand mandatory spending at all. You've been avoiding discussion on that as if it were a black man.

I've already addressed the most idiotic claims in your post, but wanted to go back on touch on these other dumb comments.

[_Kevin Graham]

I'm still astounded that you just don't know about this stuff. I mean where the hell were you? Shortly after Obama became President he announced that he would be rejecting the Bush-era gimmicks that hid the real costs of the wars from his annual deficit:



February 19, 2009
WASHINGTON — For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller. The price of more honest bookkeeping: A budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear, according to administration officials.

The new accounting involves spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Medicare reimbursements to physicians and the cost of disaster responses.

But the biggest adjustment will deal with revenues from the alternative minimum tax, a parallel tax system enacted in 1969 to prevent the wealthy from using tax shelters to avoid paying any income tax.

Even with bigger deficit projections, the Obama administration will put the country on “a sustainable fiscal course” by the end of Mr. Obama’s term, Peter R. Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said Thursday in an interview. Mr. Orszag did not provide details of how the administration would reduce a deficit expected to reach at least $1.5 trillion this year.

Mr. Obama’s banishment of the gimmicks, which have been widely criticized, is in keeping with his promise to run a more transparent government.

Fiscal sleight of hand has long been a staple of federal budgets, giving rise to phrases like “rosy scenario” and “magic asterisks.”

The $2.7 trillion in additional deficit spending, Mr. Orszag said, is “a huge amount of money that would just be kind of a magic asterisk in previous budgets.”

“The president prefers to tell the truth,” he said, “rather than make the numbers look better by pretending.”



These changes would make the debt over ten years look $2.7 trillion larger than the distorted Bush baseline, but that debt was always there. It was just being hidden. President Bush’s budgets hid billions with elaborate budget gimmicks. They took war-spending off the books, tried to eliminate the costs of wildly expensive tax cuts for the wealthy, and claimed savings through unrealistic, unspecified future cuts in vital discretionary spending.

As Steve Benen wrote, “the smoke-and-mirrors approach to which we’ve grown accustomed was ridiculous. It was a problem policymakers recognized, but didn’t want to talk about, and had no interest in fixing. It’s not only heartening to see Obama bring some sanity to the process, it will also have key practical consequences — honest budgets lead to better policy making.”

------------------------

So you're sitting here asking me why the wars didn't cause so much of a deficit during Bush, and the answer should be obvious to anyone with a pulse during his administration. The fact is Bush used gimmicks to hide the costs and so they didn't show up in the final annual deficits. He financed the wars off the books, as well as the outrageous costs incurred from his stupid Medicare D bill. We're talking more than two trillion that didn't show up during his administration, but suddenly got dumped into the official debt tally during Obama. Why? Because Obama out an end to it. He could have kept doing the same tricks but he decided to shoot for transparency. Bush fooled Americans for eight years, and he is still fooling the really dumb ones.

[_Droopy]

To give our audience just some idea how mathematically challenged you are. These are three comments you've made tonight:

1. "Bush left us with a bit over $10 trillion. It now stands at about $16.3."
2. "Obama doubled the national debt in just a little over three years"
3. "Obama has already increased the national debt 60% of the $10 trillion he inherited."

WTF?

"Bush left us with a bit over $10 trillion. It now stands at about $16.3."

Empirical fact.

"Obama doubled the national debt in just a little over three years"

That was a messed-up sentence, and my fault. Obama spent more, in just three years (($4.939 trillion) than Bush spent ($4.899 trillion) than Bush spent in his entire two terms. In other words, he spent more than Bush in less than half the time. That's a doubling of the rate (more than double, in fact) of spending.

3. "Obama has already increased the national debt 60% of the $10 trillion he inherited."

Approximately, yes, $6.3 trillion as over against somewhat over $10 trillion when Bush left office.

"The staggering national debt — up about 60% from the $10 trillion Obama inherited when he took office in January 2009 — is the single biggest blemish on Obama's record, even if the rapid descent into red began under President George W. Bush.

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

I'll take responsibility for the one sentence I mangled, because as it came out, obviously it couldn't be the case (a doubling of the national debt in three years would mean, of course, that Obama had tacked another $10 trillion onto Bush's $10 trillion).

Now, an intellectually honest interlocutor, in seeing that, would have come back and asked if that's what I really meant, or if I had misunderstood something or mixed something up in my mind in writing it. They would not have attempted an underhanded, self-serving comic smear. This is Kevin Graham, though, isn't it, and we must always negotiate your deep-seated insecurities about your own intellectual abilities, which have long manifested themselves as barking cries for attention through the insulting and questioning of the intelligence of others. I shouldn't complain, Wade - your intellectual superior by any conceivable measure - received even worse at your clawed hands than I ever have.


Are your knees hurting yet, Kevin? Have you eaten lately? Or has your devotion to The Messiah reached even deeper levels of self-denying asceticism?

[_Kevin Graham]

I'm still stunned that even someone with your lack of education could possibly fail at such a simple math test. I'm still waiting for you to develop a coherent argument that Obama is directly responsible for $6 trillion in added debt. All you've done is contradict yourself while spewing random talking points and psychoanalysis about what Obama and the "Leftists" are thinking, etc.

[_Kevin Graham]

Is no one willing to step up to the plate and explain how Obama added $6 trillion to the debt?

[_cinepro]

Is no one willing to step up to the plate and explain how Obama added $6 trillion to the debt?

Factcheck.org puts the number between your low and BCSpace's high. Although a lot obviously depends on how you divvy up the "blame":

http://www.factcheck.org/2012/09/obamas-deficit-dodge/

Obama’s response leaves the false impression that President George W. Bush and the 2008 recession are responsible for a whopping 90 percent of the deficits in the last four years.

It’s true that Obama “inherited the biggest deficit in our history,” as he said on CBS. By the time Obama took office in January 2009, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had already estimated that increased spending and decreased revenues would result in a $1.2 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2009, which began Oct. 1, 2008. In a detailed analysis of fiscal year 2009, we found that Obama was responsible for adding at most $203 billion to the deficit, which in the end topped $1.4 trillion that year.

But that was just the first of four years of trillion-plus deficits. The last three budgets fall squarely under Obama. And, during that time, the federal government ran up deficits of $1.3 trillion in 2010, $1.3 trillion in 2011, and about $1.2 trillion in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30 — for a total of nearly $5.2 trillion in deficit spending.

Now, affixing responsibility (i.e., blame) for mega-deficits and the ballooning federal debt is filled with ideological landmines. Obama doesn’t take responsibility for war spending, for example, even though he continued the spending and, in fact, increased U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan. He also doesn’t want to take the blame for the expense of creating the Medicare prescription drug program — although his federal health care law increased funding for it. (The law will gradually close the notorious doughnut hole that caused some seniors to pay nearly $2,000 in prescription drug costs because of a gap in coverage.)

Regardless of how you assess blame, this much we can say with certainty: Obama’s policies are responsible for more than 10 percent of the deficits accumulated over the last four years.

Consider that just two pieces of legislation he signed account for nearly a third of the $5.2 trillion in deficits since 2009:

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the stimulus act, will cost $831 billion through 2019, according to the CBO. The administration estimates the stimulus at $800 billion through 2011.
The Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 extended the Bush tax cuts and cut the Social Security payroll tax for two years, as well as provided relief to some taxpayers who otherwise would have had to pay the alternative minimum tax. The 2010 tax act cost nearly $800 billion in 2011 and 2012.
The administration does not take responsibility for all of the spending in the 2010 tax act (which we will detail later). But Treasury accepts that the administration is responsible for another $410 billion in additional tax cuts and spending through 2011.

That means at a minimum the Obama administration is responsible for $2 trillion, or 39 percent of the $5.17 trillion in deficits since fiscal year 2009.

Looking ahead, Obama has promised if reelected to allow the Bush-era income tax cuts to expire for upper-income taxpayers, raising the top two tax rates from 33 percent and 35 percent to 36 percent and 39.6 percent. But he would keep the tax rates at the Bush-era levels for everyone else. Obama’s plan would cost the federal government $3 trillion over 10 years compared with $3.7 trillion if he allowed all of the Bush tax cuts to remain in place.

[_Kevin Graham]

So according to factcheck.org Obama's responsible for less than a third of the increased spending Republicans have attributed to him.

[_ldsfaqs]

Kevin, your graph is a complete misrepresentation and ignoring of important facts.

First, Obama is STILL paying for the wars. Thus that needs to be added to his side.
Second, Bush tax cuts were a loss of taxes, not revenue, because revenue increased because people had more money. Further, even if you ignore that, the tax cut is not "spending", so it doesn't belong in the chart.
Third, the Medicare Drug Benefit wasn't a "new" program, it replaced several programs that cost the government much more, thus it actually reduced costs, not added to them.

Those are the ones off hand, but your chart is a complete lie.
Obama has most certainly more than doubled the debt, in fact has added more than all other presidents combined. Everyone knows it, including liberals, and some liberals trying to pervert the facts spinning them to say something else, ignoring other facts which debunk such spin doesn't make your case.

[_Kevin Graham]

Obama has most certainly more than doubled the debt

You're an idiot.