The Piker

U.S. DEFICITS BY YEARS

Yes, George W. Bush took a budget surplus from the latter part of the Clinton administration and turned it into a deficit. This was the result of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the 9/11 terror attack with its resultant financial meltdown, and then the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was not the result of the Bush tax cuts as these did nothing but encourage economic growth and vigorous employment expansion up until the time of our current financial freeze-up (the reasons for which I will not argue here). But Bush was a piker when it comes to fiscal irresponsibility. As one can see from this chart, the Obama administration, under Rahm Emanuel’s leitmotif that “we should never waste a good crisis,” is pushing social spending and our federal deficits to undreamed-of levels … and this will occur despite a planned gutting of our defense budget. This chart shows the dramatically growth of deficits under the current Obama/Emanuel plan as projected by the White House and also the impartial Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

One picture is worth a thousand words.