In case you\’re wondering what our fiscal condition is in (and if all you\’re going by is President Obama\’s pronouncement that he halved the deficit, keep wondering), here is a little reality for you, courtesy of the U.S. Treasury Department\’s Monthly Statement: with one month to go in fiscal 2014, we have a deficit of $589,185,000,000. Assuming September is the average of the other 11 months, this year\’s deficit will be about $642 billion dollars – with his average per year budget deficit at $1,071 trillion dollars.
The highest deficit we ever had under George Bush was $459 billion dollars – and his average deficit across the 7 years he was responsible for the budget (not 8: more on this further on) was about $305 billion per year.
Therefore, when President Obama tells us he has halved the deficit, he conveniently omits the fact that the deficit he is “halving” is the one he gave us. Not Bush, not Clinton, not Reagan, not Waldo, not the man in the moon, but Barack Obama.
And this “convenient omission” tactic is nothing new for Barack Obama. It is the same one he used when bragging about how he reduced our troop strength in Afghanistan.
The day that George Bush left office, there were about 31,000 U.S. troops in that awful part of the world. Under Obama, the “I\’m the guy who doesn\’t go to war” President, it rose above 90,000 – to absolutely no positive end of any kind. Unlike Bush\’s troop surge in Iraq, the Obama surge in Afghanistan, too little and too late (his generals asked for it months and months before he acted, and then he gave them less than they asked for), the only actual “accomplishment” was that far more of our military were killed or wounded during his time in office than during the Bush years.
But, after this useless, disastrous troop surge, when we started lowering our troop strength from where Barack Obama had raised it to, Mr. Obama was happy to take full credit for the reduction – as if it weren\’t him who put them there in the first place.
Going back to his deficit flim-flam, the one and only response his people have is to remind us that, since the country\’s fiscal year starts in October, most of a President\’s first year in office is under the previous President\’s budget. Therefore the 1.4 trillion dollar deficit in 2009 is Bush\’s, not Obama\’s.
And that would be an excellent point – except for another convenient omission: that the 2009 budget was not signed by President Bush before leaving office. It was held up by a Democrat congress, largely so President Obama could institute his own spending ideas; most significantly the so-called “stimulus package” – over $800 billion dollars of it.
It is not well known (chalk that up to Mr. Obama\’s “accomplice media”), but, in reality, the 2009 budget, including that roughly $850 billion dollar “stimulus” which did us little or no good but bloated the budget to unheard of numbers, was signed by Barack Obama on March 11, 2009 – almost two months after Mr. Bush left office, and almost a half year after the budget year began.
Got that? Not Bush. Obama.
Bush did not come up with the “stimulus package”, did not support it, and would never have signed that budget. Obama came up with it, supported it and signed it into law. Responsibility for the 2009 deficit, therefore, is 100% on Mr. Obama\’s shoulders.
I consider Barack Obama the worst President of my lifetime. Maybe anyone\’s. He is a Chicago politician, who had no accomplishments of any consequence in his previous political life, and no qualifications for the office this country twice elected him to. But we elected him anyway.
And in our budget deficits, as in just about every other facet of this awful administration, we continue to pay the price for doing so.
