George Bush Spent Us Into the Hole We Are In
And
Barack Obama Plans To Spend Us Out of It
by James Glaser
February 23, 2009

Sunday President Obama was talking about higher deficits for the next few years, but like every modern President before him, he is promising to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term in office. That's a neat trick considering that nobody even knows what the yearly deficit will be in his first four years. All the White House can forecast is that it will be well over a trillion dollars.... each year. So, even if Obama does somehow manage to cut his yearly deficit in half, by historical records we will still have some of the highest deficits of any President in history.

What we should be looking at is the fact that nobody in Washington, least of all President Obama, is even mentioning the word "Debt." Every time Washington spends more than it takes in, that is a deficit, but as we move on to the next year, that deficit is added to the National Debt.

Each year since 1969, Congress has spent more money than its income. The Treasury Department has to borrow money to meet Congress's appropriations. The total borrowed is more than $10,000,000,000,000 and growing. Even when government officials claim to have a surplus, they still spend more than they get in. We pay interest on that huge debt.

George Bush doubled our debt while he was in office, and the only reason Barack Obama is not going to do the same is that the debt Bush left is so high. However, in dollars spent, Barack Obama will probably spend more in his first term than George Bush did in his first four years.

Obama's First Budget Seeks To Trim Deficit
Plan Would Cut War Spending, Increase Taxes on the Wealthy
By Lori Montgomery and Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 22, 2009; A0

President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four years, primarily by raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy and by slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration officials said.

Reducing the deficit, he said, is critical: "We can't generate sustained growth without getting our deficits under control."

Obama proposes to dramatically reduce those numbers, said White House budget director Peter Orszag: "We will cut the deficit in half by the end of the president's first term." The plan would keep the deficit hovering near $1 trillion in 2010 and 2011, but shows it dropping to $533 billion by 2013, he said—still high but a more manageable 3 percent of the economy.

As you can see, it is always about the way you say it. Barack Obama is talking about cutting the deficit, but admits that until after his term is over he, will have trillion dollar deficits. They will only be cut in half after his term is over in 2013.

By that time, according to Barack Obama, our National Debt will be at least $14 billion. That means in four years Barack Obama will be adding $4 trillion to our debt. It took George Bush eight years to add $5 trillion.

Nobody talks about lowering our debt, and so more and more of our tax dollars will go to paying interest on that debt.

George Bush spent our country into financial ruin, and now Barack Obama plans to spend our country into financial prosperity. Does that sound feasible to you?

Post Script:

I can't tell you where that first quote came from, but I found it on many sites when I was looking up "Deficits versus Debt." There are a lot of ways to explain the difference, but almost every page went on to explain that our debt has grown because of deficit spending every year.

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