Say Anything Blog

By way of reporting that the budget deficit so far for 2009 is a record-setting amount larger than any full year’s deficit under the Bush administration, which is news that makes the Obama administration look really bad, the Associated Press attempts to spin the situation by claiming that Obama “inherited” the deficits.  Even those he’s created with spending he’s approved as President to date.

The Treasury Department said Friday that the budget deficit increased by $192.3 billion in March, and is near $1 trillion just halfway through the budget year, as costs of the financial bailout and recession mount.

Last month’s deficit, a record for March, was significantly higher than the $150 billion that economists expected.

The deficit already totals $956.8 billion for the first six months of the budget year, also a record for that period. The Obama administration projects the deficit for the entire year will hit $1.75 trillion.

A deficit at that level would nearly quadruple the previous annual record of $454.8 billion set last year. The March deficit was nearly four times the size of the imbalance in the same month last year. ...

The administration projects that after hitting $1.75 trillion this year, the gap between spending and tax revenues will dip to $1.17 trillion in 2010, and plunge to $533 billion in 2013. If accurate, that would fulfill Obama’s pledge to cut the deficit he inherited in half by the end of his current term in office.

Let’s remember that the deficit Bush left office with was roughly $400 billion:

I don’t know what kind of math the Associated Press is using, but $533 billion is not half of $400 billion.

The only way anyone could claim that Obama has cut a deficit in half is if you include the deficit spending Obama himself created into the equation.  But then that leaves us with a situation where Obama runs up a massive deficit, cuts that deficit in half, but then is left with a deficit that’s still more than what he “inherited” from Bush.

Since that doesn’t look at all good for Obama, the media of course spins to make it seem as though the massive deficits Obama is claiming he’ll cut (haven’t seen any evidence of that to date) came from Bush and hope that nobody notices.