Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Deficits as a Percentage of GDP From Clinton to Bush to Obama

Obama points to the economic woes of America's indebtedness as something he inherited often. This chart is a great visualization of the relative deficits under the last three presidents. Note that as bad as this looks for Obama, it was actually skewed in his favor to look as 'nice' as possible for him.

Picture embedded below.

deficits-comparison

"I am therefore going to calculate deficits for President Bush including FY 2009, as those deficits stood on January 20, 2009 when he left office. In doing so, I am assuming the overwhelming majority of the TARP spending and their deficit “blame” to President Bush, even though he committed only half the $700 B TARP. In other words, I am skewing my analysis to be as generous as possible to President Obama in the comparison with President Bush."

5 comments:

  1. how about cutting the defense budget?

    http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/02/defence_spending


    http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2010/01/26/your-insane-defense-budget-presented-in-a-single-chart/

    ReplyDelete
  2. @Ian Spencer Dubrowsky - you will get no argument from me about cutting wasteful defense spending. Though for defense I would air on the side of caution (meaning a little bit of waste would be better then not enough, if it was not possible to spend precisely the right about). If the generals say they do not need it the politicians should not force it on them wasting our money in the process.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ian Dubrowsky2/03/2010 12:45 PM

    so you think that basically the generals should 100 percent set defense spending policy? which they basically do now

    that obviously is not working, if your serious about government spending waste most of it is in the pentagon, not chesse going to poor people

    ReplyDelete
  4. The General's job is not to control the purse strings, that is for Congress. Congress would be foolish though to assume they know what our military needs more then the people on the ground, the people doing the planning/strategizing, and the people who are responsible for the implementation of those plans.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Bush ran a bunch of stuff "off budget"(the wars) that Obama corrected the day he took office... so people could see the true debt.

    ReplyDelete

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