This was how I saw things too. It seemed like much of the deficit was caused primarily by automatic spending that was in response to unemployment, plus a lot of the unfunded spending done during the Bush years.
Makes me wonder why the Republicans come out and outright accuse Obama of his spending when so much of it is demonstrably not his fault. A lot of the same Republicans voted for the policies during the Bush years that now contribute to large portions of the deficit.
Here is a good chart on the source of debt over the last decade:
Obama is the commander in chief, he can end the wars anytime he wants to. His party had control over both houses of congress, if he wanted to repeal the Bush tax cuts, the medicare drug benefits, and the education spending increases he could have done so. The fact that the programs were started under Bush when the fiscal environment was much different does not absolve Obama from responsibility. All of the spending and tax cutting since 2009 has been done by laws bearing his signature. If he can control the rise of the oceans and heal our planet, passing a budget when he had control of both houses of congress should have been a cake walk.
So you are willing to give Clinton full responsibility for the balanced budgets, and tote up $2T to Reagan and $6.6T to GWB?
Like I said, this is the easy and stupid answer.
I don’t think the President has the absolute power to just null out everything Bush enacted into policy
Do Americans actually believe their president controls their congress? And presumably that the vice-president runs the Senate?
Well, the further North you get, the more likely you are to believe the latter 
Well, IIRC the willingness of much of the Republican House to let the US default instead of raising the debt ceiling had a lot to do with that. The financial markets are still assigning a very low level of risk, and thus a very low interest rate, to federal debt.
Yeah, that whole debt down-rating thing has done fuck-all to the actual cost of US debt as far as I can tell.
It is too bad that Obama and the Dems prevented a rise in taxes for the rich, isn’t it. Then Romney might have had to pay 18%. The horror.
Cutting back on unemployment payments would do wonders for the economy, wouldn’t it? And food stamps. Newt obviously believes that food stamps are so much fun to get that poor people refuse the plentiful jobs out there just so they can collect them.
It had everything to do with the fact that our government portrayed itself as incompetent, ineffective, absurd, and self-destructive.
So Bush could do it, but Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress is powerless to undo it? I don’t see how that works - the Democrats had a larger majority in Congress than the GOP had during the Bush administration.
I think the rule of thumb is that a President has no choice besides increasing a deficit, if he inherits a recession. And the last thing you want to do in a recession is over is cut taxes.
So Bush is to blame for the deficit. He inherited a recession and increased the deficit, and cut taxes. That’s a Bad Thing, of course, especially with increased spending.
But Obama is not to blame for the deficit. He inherited a recession, and increased the deficit, and cut taxes. And this is a Good Thing, because he also increased spending.
See how simple?
Regards,
Shodan
And 180,000 troops just find their own way home?
So I can blame Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security on Republicans? Seems fair, they didn’t repeal them when they had the chance.
Technically there was a recession from March 2001 until Nov 2001. I guess you could call that “inheriting”. The recent recession was Dec 2007 until June 2009.
Either way just toting everything that happened during one president’s term and lumping all of it (or none of it) on his plate is lazy and meaningless.
You are forgetting the 2003 - 2007 period. Bush cutting taxes in 2001 was reasonable, even if it could be argued that his tax cuts were not optimal for improving the economy. But there was eventually job growth - and he neither increased taxes, which is reasonable in a strong economy, while dramatically increasing spending on the Wars and Medicare, which is stupid.
I’m all for increasing taxes on the rich now, which would have little negative impact on the economy, and increasing taxes on everyone when unemployment falls to some reasonable level and we are growing strongly.
Might I remind you that Reagan increased taxes when it made sense.
When does it make sense to raise/lower taxes?
Wow. That is a question for another thread (perhaps many). And you have to identify which taxes.
But with the broadest brush, Keynsian fiscal policy would say raise taxes during expansionary cycles and cut taxes during contraction cycles.
So basically once we get back to robust growth we should sunset the payroll tax cut and phase out the Bush-era income tax cuts. This should help moderate the boom/bust cycle while dramatically reducing the federal deficit.
No, actually I am not. The deficit in 2003 was $374 billion; in 2007 it was $158 billion. Bush achieved what Obama promised and failed to do - reducing the deficit by half.
Regards,
Shodan
Going by your calculation method, we had a $236B surplus in 2000.