Saturday, February 21, 2009
Obama's New Deficit Claims
President Obama now claims that he wants to cut the deficit in half by 2013. By his calculations, since Bush handed him a $1.3 trillion deficit, Obama's goal is to bring that down to $533 billion. ...oh yeah, except there is one problem: The 2008 deficit was $1.3 trillion only because of the one-time $700 billion TARP bill. Without that, the deficits under Bush never even approached $1.3 trillion, and in fact, never even hit $533 billion. It is a good bit of political maneuvering if Obama can pull off this bait and switch.
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2 comments:
I did not get your point. Bush and Paulson wrote the TARP, not Obama. Plus, deficit is deficit. You need to pay it back, no matter if it were "wasted" on TARP, Iraq, etc. So, if Obama can cut it by half, it's a great achievement.
My point was that the typical Bush deficits were not nearly as large as the deficit at the end of the last year that Bush was in office. The deficits that are going to be accumulated under Obama dwarf even those that were accumulated under Bush.
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