Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog comes up with a chart of Obama-era budget deficits:
and notes,
In the not-too-distant past, talk in the political world of the U.S. budget deficit was all the rage. As the Tea Party “movement” took shape, conservatives quite literally took to the streets to express their fear that President Obama and Democrats were failing to address the “out of control” deficit.
Congressional Republicans agreed. As recently as 2013, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was asked about the radicalism of his political agenda and he responded, “[W]hat I would say is extreme is a trillion-dollar deficit every year.” Around the same time, then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) argued that Congress should be “focused on trying to deal with the ultimate problem, which is this growing deficit.”
The Republican rhetoric was ridiculously wrong. We don’t have a trillion-dollar deficit; the deficit isn’t the ultimate problem; and it’s not growing.
Which is interesting, but fails to note that the Executive doesn’t make major spending decisions – Congress does. All the Executive does is propose a budget, which may be ignored by Congress. Veto threats are the only direct negotiating tactic available to the Executive. The two red bars indicate when the Democrats also held Congress; the budget deficit is highest in the second year. Then the GOP takes control of Congress and the deficits fall.
A naive observation, of course; Obama had to clean up the mess left by one of the worst Administrations in recent memory, and the announcement of a continual presence in Afghanistan reflects the magnitude of the disaster of the last GOP Administration. The chart is virtually meaningless, which Benen implicitly admits:
To reiterate a point that bears repeating, I don’t necessarily consider this sharp reduction in the deficit to be good news. If it were up to me, federal officials would be borrowing more, not less, taking advantage of low interest rates, investing heavily in infrastructure and economic development, creating millions of jobs, and leaving deficit reduction for another day.
And I agree. The Government is not expected to run at a profit. The Government is not a business. Its purpose is to govern, with all that implies. Our crumbling public works is a dangerous situation, and will result in changes perhaps unwelcome by the American public, as noted by my contributing blogger, Chris Johnson. It would benefit all of us greatly to take advantage of the low interest rates to fund the repair of roads and bridges, plumbing and national parks.
But to the group that believes everything is economic, the chart will be important, even if the interpretation is open to wide debate. Add in the GOP’s relentless push to increase Dept of War funding without raising taxes, and the cognitive dissonance becomes quite entertaining.
