Say Anything Blog

Perhaps one of the most odious fables Obama likes to tell these days has to do with a $1.3 trillion deficit he claims he “inherited.”  He most recently made that claim today in front of the citizens of Arnold, MO:

“Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit…. That wasn’t me. Number two, there is almost uniform consensus among economists that in the middle of the biggest crisis, financial crisis, since the Great Depression, we had to take extraordinary steps. So you’ve got a lot of Republican economists who agree that we had to do a stimulus package and we had to do something about the banks. Those are one-time charges, and they’re big, and they’ll make our deficits go up over the next two years.”

Now I’m not one to put a smiley face on the spending/budgeting practices of the Bush administration, particularly in the latter days of the administration, but for Obama to suggest that he somehow got stuck with a massive budget deficit he didn’t want is just plain ludicrous.

Let’s not forget that spending is controlled by Congress, not the President, and that both then-Senator Obama and his fellow Democrats were actually controlling Congress for the last two years of the Bush administration.  Further, Obama himself voted for most of the spending he’s now complaining about.  He voted for spending on the Iraq war.  Obama also voted for the TARP/auto bailouts that came at the end of the Bush administration, both of which Obama and his fellow Democrats wanted to make bigger I might add.

And since becoming President, Obama expanded the CHIP health entitlement.  He passed the “stimulus” spending spree (the largest single spending bill in American history).  He’s also signed into law a number of other costly bills that have now inflated the current budget deficit up to $1.75 trillion.

That’s over 4 times larger than the roughly $400 billion budget deficit Bush left office with.

Put simply, what Obama is complaining about is a problem he himself created.