Just when you thought George W. Bush could not have put the country in a more perilous state, you read this.
The New York Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports of the past few years to understand "how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II."
It's enough to make steam come out of my ears. And it makes me wonder how any self-respecting businessperson can have the gall to publicly identify themselves as a Republican these days, based on the debt Bush handed us alone.
Now, of course, the NY Times wouldn't be the NY Times without pulling its punches and trying to lay some blame on Clinton and Obama in the interest of journalistic "balance" (as opposed to the truth). It doesn't even come close to flying.
But first, to their credit, the Times clearly refutes the Republican meme that Obama is responsible for the huge deficits this country is facing:
There are two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years. President Obama’s agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying.
Followed quickly, of course, with:
The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested.
Gee, it's not expecting a lot for Obama to have a clear-cut plan for the deficit six months into office during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. If only their expectations were so high for everybody's favorite loser son, W.
Here's what could've been, and what was:
The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years.
In real terms, that $2 trillion annual swing means the difference for many Americans between a good education for our children, healthcare and other important government services, and not. But if you read between the lines of neocons, that was the goal all along. Starve the government and let the masses fend for themselves.
The breakdown of blame is where it gets interesting:
You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.
This is laughable. The first three categories all belong to W, and the fourth is just Obama investing in the future of the country rather than throwing money down a rat=hole like W did for years.
The "business cycles" they refer to are the dot bomb of 2001 and the recent financial meltdown. To tie Clinton to the dot bomb is ridiculous on its face, and he still left W a healthy surplus to deal with it. And to compare the criminal neglect of our financial system by W and the resulting crisis to a tech bubble is ridiculous.
What is amazing is that the second category -- 33 percent of the deficit -- was caused directly by W-led legislation like tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug beneft. And we are still paying for these heavy burdens on the national debt.
The third category ties Obama to W's policies when it's really the other way around -- Obama's hands were tied by W:
Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.
Obama is extending the Bush Iraq War policy? WTF? He's ending it in as a responsible and politically viable way as possible.
On the tax cut front, I see that as part of a necessary economic stimulus that reverses the W version of trickle down. And the bailouts? Don't even get me started. That's W's fault all the way -- Obama is trying to stop a total cratering of the economy.
But the best line from the article for me is:
Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of a widely cited study on the dangers of the current deficits, describes the situation like so: "Bush behaved incredibly irresponsibly for eight years.
Auerbach should've stopped right there. And that should be the screaming fucking bloody headline for The New York Times and any other trad media outlet that enabled W the past eight years.