The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has an excellent new report explaining the causes of the federal budget deficit.
If you guessed, as some of our Tea Bag friends appear to argue, that the deficits began only on January 20, 2009, you're wrong!
The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities rightly explains how President Obama inherited the vast majority of the deficit from his predecessor:
The events and policies that have pushed deficits to astronomical levels in the near term, however, were largely outside the new Administration's control. If not for the tax cuts enacted during the Presidency of George W. Bush that Congress did not pay for, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that began during that period, and the effects of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression (including the cost of steps necessary to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term.
Again, I will not find any deficit hawk credible if he or she did not oppose the Bush tax cuts or demand that Bush find a way to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you weren't there fighting this fight under 43's misrule, when projections of over $5 trillion in surpluses were turned into trillions of red ink, I'm not really interested in listening to your blather now.
Leave a comment