What portion of the US debt is due to Bush’s policies vs Obama’s policies? Much of the debt can be attributed to non-policy issues such as falling revenues due to unemployment and rising costs. I am mostly interested in debt directly attributed to policies and decisions (including wars, tax cuts, etc).
I found these numbers on another cite without a citation:
Debt Caused by New Policies
Obama: $1.44 trillion
Bush: $5.07 trillion
I would appreciate some statistics for this matter.
The chart on this page might help: http://blogs.reuters.com/david-cay-johnston/2011/08/02/fact-free-fiscal-farce/
Thanks, that’s a great chart.
This is the graph you’re thinking of: it compares how much the policy decisions of George W. Bush and Barack Obama contributed to the current deficit (Clinton didn’t contribute at all). Bush contributed $5.07tn, Obama contributed $1.44tn. The biggest contributor was Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. The second biggest were Bush’s portion of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The third biggest was Obama’s stimulus plan, although it’s important to remember that was temporary, whereas most of the Bush policies were intended to be permanent.
That leaves out an important part of the picture though, because it’s not just policy decisions that affect the budget, it’s also the economy. The biggest overall contributor to the current deficit was the 2007-2009 economic crash, which cratered tax revenues as people lost their jobs and forced up spending on the social safety net. This fact sheet details all contributions to the federal deficit, both policy ones and non-policy. They conclude that about a third of the current deficit is due to the economy, and two-thirds is due to policy decisions made under either Bush or Obama. Most of that two-thirds is due to policy decisions made under Bush (and, incidentally, supported by most of the current Republican Congress, including John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan). There’s no reasonable way to slice it to pin any major share of the blame on Obama: he can’t be responsible for the economic crisis that was in full swing before he took office, and most of the policy decisions that created today’s deficit happened long before he became President.
Here is a partly dissenting view.
The first chart is deceptive because it talks about the actual deficit, not the policies as per the OP. It also uses percent (!!!) without clarifying what is meant. The first graph is “Growth” meaning, for example, LBJ/JFK jacked up (sorry!) Eisenhower’s puny debt by a puny-in-dollars 25% or so.
Similarly, a lot of the 25%-of-$14-trillion debt that Obama is allegedly responsible for is a result of a major crash that happened a few months before he took office. If you don’t believe he should have done the stimulus spending, go read the history of policy behind the Great Depression.
To be “fair and balanced”, a lot of the Obama policy spending is ot yet come home to roost. Real costs for Obamacare will appear when people start needing government subsidies for it, probably several years off. However, congress is equally guilty of this crap - they will tell you they cut 1 or 2 trillion off goernment spending even though
(a) that’s over 10 years, so if they don’t deliver by 2021 good luck voting them out;
(b) this is the same bozo farm that passed the budgets, earmarks and all, that promised to spend all that money,
© that’s cuts of projected future increases in spending, not actual “less dollars than today” spending,
(d) it’s not going to happen until a committee of congress recommends the cuts, roughly the same process as the debt limit talks, but without any drop-dead urgency.
The real problems are two-fold - the government spends too much, and does not take enough in. A lot of the spending is what are called entitlements - in fairness, they are the fault of every president and congress since decades ago… as mentioned, blame everyone from JFK forward. All the plans to “rescue” social security or medicare have just been band-aids to postpone the problem until after the next congressional electon, and the next one, and the next one. If the tea-baggers in congress do give some sense of urgency for finding a quasi-permanent solution, that’s the one productive result.
In Canada, for example, the solution to CPP (Canada’s mostly old-age pension, like SS) was to basically double the premiums we pay. Do you think the average Joe is going to welcome a doubling of their social security taxes? But SS is on track to pay out a lot more than it has taken in and socked away in T-bills. Again, more money gotta come in, or less out.
Medicare is in the same boat. COsts for treatments keep going up and up, far faster than inflation. Thanks to a disappearing industrial base (fewer well-paid workers) and a coming crash in baby-boomer retirement plans, a lot more are going to be on medicare, and their treatments will cost a great deal more, and as old people, they will need more treatment. Again, something’s gotta give. Pay doctors and hospitals a lot less, or toss sick people out on the sidewalk.
You can’t really blame either medicare or ss on Bush or Obama. The real deals have to be worked out in congress, since if any president goes to congress and says “here’s how to fix XXXX”, there will be a lot of shouting and horse trading and the final result will look nothing like the original plan, especially if it involves taking more money or spending less - and what else is there?
If anything, there’s one more pie of blame to smack a POTUS in the face with. The one person able to push the hardest for fixes really is the president, during a second term, since he does not need to be concerned about re-election. there was a real hope that Bush would fix SS once and for all in 2005. His solution - move all the SS funds into personal accounts, then dump them into the stock market. (The amount of commisions this would generate for friends-of-POTUS was irrelevant). Wouldn’t that have been a marvellous legacy, to basically destroy the retirement fund of every American? Fortunately, not.