Just two points to make about responsibility for the deficit:
The President doesn’t set spending or revenue policy alone. Congress does the bulk of it. The President only proposes a budget, and then signs or vetoes (or, every once in a while, has a veto overruled) bills involving spending. You can’t hold any president responsible for spending or tax policy. Most of it is Congress.
The spending doesn’t all happen in a President’s term. Lots of spending comes from bills in previous years. It often doesn’t all get spent in the same year it is appropriated.
The economy is a HUGE factor. The deficit can go up without a penny of increased spending, or reduced taxes, if the economy goes in the tank for a while.
So the bottom line is that the question is unfair. No president is fully responsible for deficits.
True, but not “one-year” spending. Some of the stimulus money is still being spent this year. Deficits are measured based on outlays (current spending) not appropriations (counted in the year they are passed into law).
Also, if you notice, tax cuts last for more than one year too, so…
Huh? What is “ever growing” about the cost of the Iraq war? And Obama is the one who proposed the troop increase in Afghanistan. He could absolutely have reduced the cost of that war, and I wish he had. I have no idea how much the increased drone strikes in Pakistan are costing, but that’s another escalation he is responsible for in that theater.
The thing about deficits is that you usually run big ones in bad times, and we’ve been through some of the badest times since the 1930s. I don’t really see that comparing the Bush years with the Obama years makes that much sense.
This chart shows that spending went flat after a sharp increase in 2007-2008 (the stimulus and unemployment spending etc.), while revenue dropped dramatically beginning around 2000 or so (Bush tax cuts, two recessions).
You could bring the spending back down to the trend, and revenue back up, and get a rough picture of where you’d expect us to be if the trends had continued. I think doing that shows that revenue loss is more responsible for deficits than spending is.
Does anyone actually claim this? I think most Obama supporters claim that since the economy has been so poor, the deficits are worthwhile stimulus, not that Obama is a budget hawk.
Yeah, that’s the argument he used against me when I complained about the budget during the Bush years. Sigh.
True, but the President does have a lot to do with the budget, since he can threaten a veto, and he proposes the budget in the first place, etc. Not to mention horse-trading.
Many commanders thought that increasing the number of service people in Aphganistan would end the war faster,but no one ever thought the men who were trained to help their country would turn what they had learned on the coalition forces. And it takes a lot of money to run a war! We should have taken care of Aphganistan before we got in to a war with Iraq in the first place, Bush Jr’s Father was warned that goining into Baghdad woulld raise up all the crazies in the region, that is why he didn’t go there in the first place. We were led into war in Iraq by false information, the costs increased by thousands (if not more)dollars a day. When a fire gets bigger it takes more to put it out, and that is what Obama’s intentions were. Iraq is now costing us less but still is costing us, and with no money to pay for the wars, the higher the cost will get. If Romney is elected the deficit will continue to rise. sooner or later Peter has to pay Paul.
The budget was NOT passed during Bush’s term, therefore FY2009 belongs to President Obama. Crediting that huge spending increase to GWB has been one of the more dishonest talking points pushed by some sources.
Quit covering for Obama. The recent debt for his term is his fault. He could have cut the debt like he promised but he didnt. Time to get rid of Obama and his lies.
Almost six months into the fiscal year, Congress gave final approval to a fiscal year (FY) 2009 omnibus bill on March 10 combining the nine unfinished appropriations bills, which President Obama later signed into law (P.L. 111-8) on March 11. ** The Democratic Congress’ decision to delay finalizing the 2009 appropriations and avoid the threat of a veto by former President Bush seems to have paid off and allowed the new 111th Congress to provide additional domestic discretionary funds including research and development (R&D)**
No one ever thought this, even though it’s been happening for years? You are making a very good case for getting rid of Obama if he’s that stupid. You said there was nothing Obama could have done, but in fact it was his plan that increased the cost of the Afghanistan war.
What’s with the weird spelling of Afghanistan? It’s not Greek. And all that has nothing to do with the fact that the war was already winding down when Obama took over, so there wasn’t an “ever growing cost”.
And, of course, it is worse than that because not only does the deficit reduce revenues but also it is necessary to provide stimulus in the form of some combination of increased spending and reduced taxes in order to fix the whole in the economy.
The bottom line is this: George W Bush inherited a budget in surplus and a fair mild economic downturn and he squandered the surplus on a combination of things like tax cuts for the wealthy and an unnecessary war in Iraq. Obama inherited a budget in deficit and an economy in meltdown. It would have been irresponsible and counterproductive of him to try to fix the deficit in the midst of the worst economic and financial disaster since the Great Depression. What was needed was a massive injection of money into the economy, probably (as economists like Krugman have argued) more than he was willing to ask for or Congress would have been willing to give him.
The key fact that’s always missing in these discussions of spending is that there are two kinds of spending: discretionary (which pays for government personnel, routine operations, defense, foreign aid, R&D, and similar stuff) and mandatory (which is primarily Social Security and Medicare, but also includes unemployment benefits, veterans care, Medicaid, and other benefits).
Congress has to approve appropriations bills for discretionary programs every year. Mandatory programs are on autopilot unless a new law is passed to change those benefits.
Spending on discretionary programs (not including war funding) has grown by about $100 billion from 2007 to today (roughly $950 billion to about $1.04 trillion today). Half of that increase is for non-war defense spending. Contrary to Sam Stone’s assumption that there is a “new normal” for agency budgets, any increase for agency budgets would be reflected in this figure. But budget increases of this size over the past 5 years indicates that, with the exception of defense, government operating budgets are basically flat.
Where is all the “new” spending coming from? Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, jobless benefits, and that sort of stuff. The idea that Obama (and Congress) needs to cut this spending during a recession is just bizarre. Do we really want to eliminate unemployment? Cut health care for poor people who are out of work because of the economy? Punish seniors because the baby boomers are retiring?
These bills would be coming due for any president. It isn’t fair to say Obama is responsible for increasing Social Security spending for baby boomers who are retiring.
However, Obama (and any other president) has to take responsibility for what happens on his watch. That doesn’t mean that the right-wing attack that Obama has increased spending is an accurate charge.
I distinctly remember seeing Bush say that the war on Iraq would NOT distract us from Afghanistan, and rolling my eyes. That was about the last we heard of Afghanistan for several years.
Thanks for the link, Nemo. I was hoping to find something like that.
I’m aware of that, but thanks for pointing it out. It’s definitely a significant factor, and no doubt steadily growing due to demographics. When you extrapolate that into the future is when things get really scary.
