Obama's unprecedented accomplishment is now official

[_ldsfaqs]

Obama has most certainly more than doubled the debt

You're an idiot.

Only in your satan induced perverted mind.

[_Kevin Graham]

If the debt was practically $11 trillion when Bush left office, and more than $2 trillion of that was hidden from the books, only to be revealed after Obama's transparency efforts, and the current debt stands at $16 trillion, then it is a mathematical impossibility that Obama could have been personally responsible for "doubling" the debt when he'd only be responsible for roughly $3 trillion increase at most. My daughter who is in third grade could explain this to you. In order for the debt to have "doubled" to 16, it would have had to have been 8 at most.

So yes, you're an idiot. You've clearly ignored everything that's been said in this thread and are just making up numbers to match your Right Wing talking points - just like Droopy. No wonder he fled the scene embarrassed. If you do not understand basic math, you have no business talking about the budget, the deficit or the debt.

And all this bitching and moaning about the "doubled" debt ignores the fact that Reagan tripled it and Bush doubled it. You know, the examples of "Conservative" administrations. Where was the outrage by all these so called fiscally responsible conservatives? They never gave a damn about the debt until they realized it was the one thing they could use to attack the black guy.

[_EAllusion]

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

That's not at all what that link says. It gives a bare minimum floor of 2 trillion, but then also puts on a compelling case that it should be substantially greater than that. It gives two examples of very big ticket items that have contributed to the debt. The first is the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The Obama admin, while inheriting the Iraq war from Bush, wanted to back-down on the Bush negotiated time-table for withdrawal and keep a substantial military force there indefinitely. It failed, but such behavior suggests that it might be reasonable to attribute greater than 0 dollars to the Obama admin's efforts on that front. The Afghanistan war provides a more bright line. There has been substantial support from both the progressive flank and the more libertarian right flank to end the war in Afghanistan for years. An accelerated withdrawal has had strong public support for many years as well. Obama could've gone that route, but he instead chose to escalate American presence and prolong the conflict. Regardless of how you feel about that policy, it stands to reason that the war and its associated spending should be tallied against him going forward from that point. It's his war on his terms. I don't think it makes much sense to credit all deficit spending to previous administrations in instances where the current administration has the political power to end it but instead favors the spending.

The prescription drug benefit costs are the other example brought up. This is burning a hole in the American pocket. It was started as a Bush admin policy, but Obama has continued to support med part D and expanded it in the Affordable Care Act. It's hard to argue that 0 dollars of that policy should be credited with any administrations post Bush even when they support and expand the policy in the face of opposition. It's even harder to argue that's what the politifact article is proposing. It's clearly not. Instead, it's saying that while assessing blame is tricky, there's a strong case to be made that in addition to that other 2 trillion it credits, Obama deserves substantial credit for those programs as well.

Saying Obama is only responsible for the 2 trillion or so in new programs implies that he is powerless to reverse course on previous administration behavior and improve the deficit situation. I don't think that's a fair assessment. The blame is more complicated than that. Moreover, you personally have said that as long as there's a slugging economy then deficits don't matter, so I'm not sure why you're being so defensive on this point. If your previous posts are any indication, you seem to believe there should be a green light for any conceivable level of deficit spending in a poor economy. This is a misunderstanding of Keynesian thought in of itself, but the flip side to that in Keynesian thinking is that as revenues increase on an economic upturn, the contrary approach to government spending should rule. And if there's anything we can count on American politicians to do is show fiscal restraint when their coffers are flush with cash. What could possibly go wrong with that?

[_Kevin Graham]

You didn't pay attention to what I said. Read it again. I said Obama is responsible for roughly $2 trillion in additional "spending". "Out of control spending" is the complaint from the Right which they use to label him a socialist or what not. Factcheck is talking about how the "deficits" have remained during Obama's four years in office. It adds them up and attributes blame accordingly, but a lot of that isn't "spending" at all. Even with the $800 billion stimulus, only $550 of that was actual spending, the rest tax cuts for the middle-lower classes. Are Conservatives really complaining about Obama's tax cuts? Well not directly, but they'll complain about the deficits without acknowledging what portion of that is caused by those tax cuts. Which is why I'm addressing his so-called "out of control spending" which doesn't really exist.

As I said earlier, the bulk of the increased deficits didn't come from "new spending" from "Obama the Socialist". They came from skyrocketing mandatory spending which was already set in motion long before he arrived, coupled with drastically reduced revenues. Factcheck doesn't even address this issue really. It doesn't detail which areas of government spending necessarily increased during the Obama years. Not once. Instead it just adds up the deficits and makes a judgment call based on who is President at the time those things happened.

Take for example, the ridiculous increase of health care. That is what's killing us, and its staggering incline had nothing to do with Obama. But how does it affect the deficit?
Between 1992 and 2003, annual Medicare spending was between $189-260 billion. But thanks to rising health care, and Bush's Medicare D, payouts jumped well over $300 billion and has increased every year since. Under Obama the government has had to pay an average of $460 billion a year. These are entitlements paid out to those who are, well entitled to them. And since he has been in office that adds up to about a trillion in spending that increased due to no fault of his own.

Likewise, 2009 was the first time Social Security payouts passed $700 billion, which was a $74 billion increase from the previous year. It has risen each year and just passed $800 billion thanks to baby boomers retiring in droves. That's at least another half trillion in deficits. These things add up and once you consider the lost revenues due to the Bush tax cuts, this better explains why the debt is going up so quickly. And yes, I know Obama extended those cuts them an extra year, but that was a compromise he had to make because the Republicans took unemployment benefits hostage. These folks make it sound like if the Bush tax cuts had never existed, that Obama would have implemented them anyway, therefore he should be faulted for the lost revenues. That's nonsense.


Government spending has increased at a gradual rate along with revenues. This is to be expected especially for a country of this size with population growth as it is. But things went really out of whack during Bush, and everything started going in the wrong directions at the end of his second term. The best thing to do now is get the economy on track and get tax rates back to what they were under Clinton, and eventually things will even out again. But Republicans don't want the economy to improve until one of their guys is in office so they can get the credit for it.

They keep saying Obama is an out of control spender, but look at the graph. Look at how spending has leveled off, which is a no small thing considering its natural course has been inclining for decades.