In response to this comment…
If you look at the attached article to the chart, you will see that Ezra Klein reports 4.7 trillion dollars:
“When Obama took office, the national debt was about $10.5 trillion. Today, it’s about $15.2 trillion. Simple subtraction gets you the answer preferred by most of Obama’s opponents: $4.7 trillion.”
The chart was not done by the Washington Post; it was done by The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
I will also quote a large section of Klein’s article here:
“But ask yourself: Which of Obama’s policies added $4.7 trillion to the debt? The stimulus? That was just a bit more than $800 billion. TARP? That passed under George W. Bush, and most of it has been repaid.
There is a way to tally the effects Obama has had on the deficit. Look at every piece of legislation he has signed into law. Every time Congress passes a bill, either the Congressional Budget Office or the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the effect it will have on the budget over the next 10 years. And then they continue to estimate changes to those bills. If you know how to read their numbers, you can come up with an estimate that zeros in on the laws Obama has had a hand in.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities was kind enough to help me come up with a comprehensive estimate of Obama’s effect on the deficit. As it explained to me, it’s harder than it sounds.
Obama, for instance, is clearly responsible for the stimulus. The health-care law, too.
When Obama entered office, the Bush tax cuts were already in place and two wars were ongoing. Is it fair to blame Obama for war costs four months after he was inaugurated, or tax collections 10 days after he took office?
So the center built a baseline that includes everything that predated Obama and everything we knew about the path of the economy and the actual trajectory of spending through August 2011. Deviations from the baseline represent decisions made by the Obama administration. Then we measured the projected cost of Obama’s policies.
In two instances, this made Obama’s policies look more costly. First, both Democrats and Republicans tend to think the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts is a quirky budget technicality, and their full extension should be assumed. In that case, voting for their extension looks costless, and they cannot be blamed for the resulting increase in deficits. I consider that a dodge, and so I added Obama’s decision to extend the Bush tax cuts for two years — at a total cost of $620 billion — to his total. If Obama follows through on his promise to extend all the cuts for income under $250,000 in 2013, it will add trillions more to the deficit.”
Additionally, I will quote a substantial portion of the FactCheck link you cited:
“In fact, the upward trend began with Ronald Reagan’s fiscal 1982 budget, declined somewhat from fiscal 1997 through 2001, and resumed the upward climb with George W. Bush’s first budget in fiscal 2002 (which started Oct. 1, 2001).
And the rise accelerated as the economy slid into the worst recession since the Great Depression, starting in December 2007. As the economy shrank, the debt-to-GDP ratio jumped 5 percentage points in the fiscal year that started Oct. 1, 2007, and another 14.8 percentage points during the following year. Obama took office nearly one-third of the way into that 12-month period. At the time, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was projecting the deficit for that fiscal year would be $1.2 trillion. It later rose to $1.4 trillion after enactment of Obama’s economic stimulus package, to be followed by back-to-back deficits of nearly $1.3 trillion in fiscal 2010 and $1.3 trillion again in fiscal 2011. CBO just projected the deficit for the current fiscal year, ending Sept. 30, will be $1.1 trillion.
A caution: The chart we’ve shown here is for total debt, including money the government owes to itself, chiefly through the Social Security trust funds. But a chart tracking only the debt owed to the public would show a similar shape. CBO projects that the debt owed to the public was nearly 68 percent of GDP in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, and will reach 73 percent this year and exceed 75 percent at the end of fiscal 2013.
We won’t attempt here to assess which side is more to blame for the mounting debt, or how much of the increase is Obama’s fault. Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein argues that the economic stimulus and other Obama policies account for just under $1 trillion of the debt added since he took office, while Bush added $5.1 trillion in his eight years — mostly due to tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the other hand, former Washington Post reporter Eric Pianin and others fault Obama for not getting more strongly behind the recommendations of his own deficit-reduction commission more than a year ago. Obama agreed to extend Bush’s tax cuts for two years, even as his commission called for tax reform. And he attacked Republican proposals to hold down the cost of Medicare, despite the commission’s call to move beyond the “phantom savings” in his own health care law, savings the commission said “will never materialize.””
So, the answer is both articles are correct. Here is what I think should be the lessons:
- If the source (i.e., Washington Post) is incorrect we should show exactly how it is incorrect and detail where it went wrong. To just say it is wrong and not explain why leaves the matter up to faith (i.e., whatever one’s ideology predisposes one to believe). I think there are objective facts that can prove the reality of the situation (either, neither or some of both ways). In any case, we do not have to leave it up to ideology.
- To imply that President Obama made 4.7 trillion dollars worth of bills is misleading at best and I prefer to say a “lie” of the right. True there was 4.7 trillion dollars added to the debt after Obama took office. However, it is hardly fair to blame Obama for all the mandatory spending that he did not originate or much of the discretionary spending. In 2010 mandatory spending was 55% of the budget and defense discretionary was 20%. This amounts to 75% of the 2010 budget. 6% was interest on the debt. The remaining 19% was all the rest of the discretionary spending. If you look at Figure 5 of the CBO report I cited in the essay (http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/10-26-DiscretionarySpending_Testimony.pdf) on page 22 of the pdf you will see that defense discretionary has been going down since the Bush years due to Obama’s budget and the Budget Control Act that President Obama signed into law on August 2, 2011 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_Control_Act). This was also the bill that created the “super committee” which will have further dramatic effects on the budget going ahead if we go over the “fiscal cliff”. If you state that President Obama increased the debt 4.7 trillion dollars then I think it is also your responsibility to state exactly how he, personally, added 4.7 trillion to the debt. Otherwise, you are only repeating political propaganda that only reinforces dogma and does nothing the gives folks the facts they need to think critically.
- Even according to the FactCheck link the “debt-to-GDP ratio jumped 5 percentage points in the fiscal year that started Oct. 1, 2007, and another 14.8 percentage points during the following year”. The recession pushed more folks towards the federal poverty limit which put more people on entitlement. However, the middle class had been sliding that way for some time before Obama, they just went down faster after the recession. The CBO and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) also agree on the benefit of the Affordable Care Act as opposed to doing nothing or repealing. Additionally, the CBO historical budget sources I cited do not show a 45% increase in spending starting in 2009. This is misleading. It actually shows a decrease in spending in 2009 and again in 2012. Take a look at the total outlays from 2008 to 2009 when Bush was still in office. That sharp increase during the last year of the Bush administration was dramatically changed by Obama or we would have been looking at almost a straight line increase. I made all these points in the article and they still stand unless you have details that would counter the CBO, GAO, OMB and CMS.
In general, I think that Republicans have proved over the last few years of the Obama administration that they would rather make the debt worse than compromise with the Democrats. We could have had “President Obama’s full plan to slash upwards of $3 trillion from federal budget deficits over 10 years” (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-spending-cuts-spread-pain/story?id=14560170). This is how we could have reduced the debt dramatically. I have also written about how we should have started from the Simpson-Bowles plan (http://mixermuse.com/blog/2012/06/25/simpson-bowles-revisted/). I think the days of bipartisan compromise are over and I think, no matter who gets elected, we may have to govern by ultimatum, the fiscal cliff and letting the Bush tax cuts expire. This will be very ugly and the ones yelling the loudest about spending and debt will be squealing the most when it hits. IMO, this is not the politicians fault, it is the voter’s fault – they are getting exactly what they deserve and voted for.
