Is there any fact to this statement? Maybe “Under the Obama administration” would be more accurate, but I posted what was said to me. When I was presented with this “fact” I was told to “Google it” to verify its accuracy. We all know what that’s about.
I don’t even know where to start to get accurate information about such a statistic, assuming it exists.
Wikipedia’s a decent place to start.
It looks like George W. Bush (2001-2009) increased the debt by $6,106 billion during his tenure, which is more than a 100% increase and he butt-fucked the economy in the process. Obama’s debt may be similar or even slightly greater but a lot of that was fixing the damage done by his predecessor.
The national debt nearly tripled under Reagan (from $994 to $2,867 billion) and while the raw numbers may be smaller, the dollar’s value was much less back then.
This sounds like one of those Conservative-happy factoids which spits out raw numbers with no concept of how they should be interpreted. Like how GWB received more votes than any Presidential candidate in history – well duh, that’s because there were more people!!!
Search on U.S. federal debt by year. It will take you to the U.S. Treasury.
Date Dollar Amount
09/30/2015 18,150,604,277,750.63
09/30/2014 17,824,071,380,733.82
09/30/2013 16,738,183,526,697.32
09/30/2012 16,066,241,407,385.89
09/30/2011 14,790,340,328,557.15
09/30/2010 13,561,623,030,891.79
09/30/2009 11,909,829,003,511.75
09/30/2008 10,024,724,896,912.49
09/30/2007 9,007,653,372,262.48
09/30/2006 8,506,973,899,215.23
09/30/2005 7,932,709,661,723.50
09/30/2004 7,379,052,696,330.32
09/30/2003 6,783,231,062,743.62
09/30/2002 6,228,235,965,597.16
09/30/2001 5,807,463,412,200.06
09/30/2000 5,674,178,209,886.86
Reading that is a bit tricky. September 30 is the end of the federal fiscal year. The fiscal year (FY) budget for FY 2001 started on Oct. 1, 2000 and ended on Sept. 30, 2001. That means it was the budget devised by Bill Clinton, not George Bush. Similarly, the budget for FY 2009 started on Oct. 1, 2008 and ended on Sept. 30, 2009, which means it was the budget devised by George Bush, not Barack Obama.
What happens next when certain parties want to disparage Obama is obvious. The FY 2009 debt is assigned to Obama, not Bush as it properly should be. And that year had the biggest debt. Voila, Obama is screwed.
The proper way to read it is to compare the debt increase from 09/30/2001 to 09/30/2009 to the debt increase from 09/30/2001 to 09/30/2015.
So $6,102,365,591,311 to $6,240,775,274,239. That’s more in absolute terms, though the annual increases are much smaller since FY 2009. In percentage terms, the Bush debt increased by 105% and the Obama debt by 52%.
The answer to dnooman’s question is therefore no, Obama did not come close to increasing the debt more than all previous presidents combined. Bush, however, most certainly did do so. That’s what a greater than 100% increase means. And Reagan had done so earlier. Irony. It’s a bitch.
RE: " fixing the damage done by his predecessor."
That is probably a good chunk of it; ongoing and new expenses as a result of destabilizing the Middle East
How do you even define the debt generated by “all Presidents combined”? Do you add each President’s debt by dollar amount, or inflation-adjusted dollars, or debt as percentage of GDP?
Or perhaps the debt at any time should be considered the sum total of all the debt generated by all the Presidents up to that point. In which case, if the debt doubled during a President’s term, then he technically generated more debt than all previous Presidents combined. But that’s like saying if “my credit card balance doubled this month, so I generated more credit card debt this month than all my life combined up to last month.”
This is the properly nuanced way to ask the question. I thought about addressing it, but in the end the question was asked without nuance and a simple blunt answer that it was stupidly wrong is probably the best response.
[quote=“buddha_david, post:2, topic:738690”]
Wikipedia’s a decent place to start.
<snip>
he butt-fucked the economy in the process.[\QUOTE]
I have a hard time believing that comes from Wikipedia.
It’s very disingenuous to say any debut generated during a President’s term was “generated by” that President (or by that Congress). Many expenses and revenue sources are set by existing law, not by that year’s budget. And the amount of spending can change even if the law doesn’t. For example, the tax rate is set by law, but the actual tax revenue depends on how well the economy is doing. Medicare/Medicaid payments are set by law, but the actual spending depends on how many people need it. Social Security payments increase as the population age. Social security nets - food stamp payouts, unemployment benefits, etc - increase because the economy gets bad, not because the President (or Congress) changed anything. And interest on existing debt is a significant expense which a President has no control over.
This is one of those things about politics that makes my brain chafe. As others have pointed out, it’s factually untrue that the last 6 years have been a particularly bad period for debt creation. More importantly, though, Obama has very little to do with it. Congress controls the purse strings, and congress is mostly Republicans. Granted, it’s Republicans who completely destroyed the budget under Bush, but they could now, in theory, take some credit for helping to curb the spending growth that started back then.
Instead, it’s better for them to blame Obama for the lie than it is to take credit for the truth. Boggles the mind.
Deficits are created when more goes out than comes in. So you can increase the debt by sending more out (starting a war is a good way to proceed) or reducing the amount coming in. Reducing taxes is one way to do that. Sending the economy into the tank is a another.
I guess my real point is that there is too many things going into this that the president has little control over for such a statement to have any real meaning. You could as accurately say that a congress dominated by the Republicans increased the debt by 7 trillion.