"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."
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 16:35:52 +0000
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