With bailouts of banks and automakers, an economic stimulus package and ambitious programs to address health care, energy and education, President Barack Obama is absorbing a lot of heat from critics who say he is chiefly responsible for driving up the nation’s budget deficit.
But those critics are full of hot air.
David Leonhardt, who writes an economics column for The New York Times and who worked for BusinessWeek magazine, analyzed nearly a decade’s worth of reports from the Congressional Budget Office.
His analysis centered on the fact that when President Bill Clinton completed his second term in January 2001 the budget office projected that the federal government would enjoy annual surpluses of more than $800 billion from 2009 to 2012. Instead, the U.S. is expected to have annual budget deficits of $1.2 trillion in those years, a negative swing of $2 trillion.
What Leonhardt found — as reprinted in a column Saturday in the Las Vegas Sun — is that the recession of 2001 and the current recession, coupled with the policies of former Republican President George W. Bush, is responsible for 70 percent of that swing.
Democrat Obama can be linked to the remaining 30 percent, but the bulk of that has to do with the continuation of Bush policies — including the Iraq war, Wall Street bailout and tax cuts — that are also supported by Republicans in Congress.
Only one-tenth of the negative swing can be tied directly to the stimulus package or to other domestic programs being pursued by Obama.
What this means is that Obama is wrongfully shouldering the lion’s share of blame for the nation’s budget problems, most of which he inherited.
We have said all along that Obama would be inheriting one mess after another from the Bush administration. What is getting tiresome is listening to critics of deficit spending who seem to have forgotten that this financial train wreck started long before Obama took office.
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