The Fiscally Impossible 0
Steve Chapman’s column today seems rather muddled.
He seems to start off intending to counter claims that President Obama’s administration has, by and large, pursued responsible budgetary policies (“Yes, Virginia, there was a spending binge”).
Unfortunately for that thesis, Chapman finds this line derailed by some of those pesky “facts” for which he seems to have an unusual respect (which is one reason I read his columns).
He winds up admitting that the legacy of Bushonomics makes reducing (or even restraining) the national debt, at least in the short term, a fiscally impossible endeavor (emphasis added).
Maybe so, but he couldn’t have done it without the GOP. Under Bush, the budget surplus — yes, we once had a federal budget surplus — vanished, giving way to repeated deficits running into the hundreds of billions.
Under Bush, the publicly held federal debt more than doubled. One reason Obama has run deficits is that he has to cover the interest payments for all the borrowing done before he took over.
Bush, it’s worth noting, didn’t launch his spending spree in his final fiscal year. He did it in his first. From 2001 to 2008, federal spending rose by 31 percent, after adjustment for inflation, and went from 18.2 percent of GDP to 20.8 percent of GDP — a 14 percent increase. Oh, and then there was the 2009 deluge of red ink, most of which came from Bush’s inkwell.
Republicans: watch what they do, not what they say.
