Right Wing Finance

Much has been made of Obama’s ballooning federal deficits, but to be fair it isn’t just Obama. The President sets the direction, but Congress controls the money. Also, George W. Bush had some deficit spending of his own, to be sure. But check out this graphic from the usgovernmentspending.com:

This data is actual spending – not some fanciful projection of what might (or might not) really be in the next 10 years.

You can see that Bush did indeed inherit a surplus (thanks to conservatives in congress during much of Clinton’s two terms). Also, you can see that government spending under the Bush Administration did bump up the federal deficit, buy also not how economic expansion and low taxes created a smaller deficit in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Enter 2008 and bailout madness and we see the deficit again jump up near the $500 billion mark. But where it gets really scary is not so much that the Obama Administration is pushing toward the $2 trillion mark, but that fact that it jumped so much so fast.

It’s the rate of deficit growth that’s truly frightening.

And that doesn’t take into account slower economic growth in the immediate future, the crippling effect of tax hikes, increase in energy costs (thanks to cap and trade) and the interest payments on all this new debt.

It’s going to take a lot more than Obama’s proposed $100 million in savings over the next 10 years to bring the deficit back down out of the stratosphere.

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