In the American, Veronique de Rugy writes, “The Bush-era deficits were bad. I know. I spent eight years complaining about them. How does President Obama stack up?”
And note that while things appear to stabilize in the mid-teens in the above illustration, that may very well be a case of wishful thinking, de Rugy writes:
Obama’s deficits are frightening but they promise to get worse. Each month that goes by the president adds spending to the deficit. The August 2009 projections for instance, do not include any of the president’s healthcare reform spending and they assume that the “temporary” stimulus spending will not be prolonged past fiscal 2011. Finally, they also assume that the economy will recover soon and that it will grow enough to generate increasing tax revenue, in spite of the president’s plan to impose new taxes and regulations on the private sector. In other words, the deficit will likely continue to deteriorate beyond the current projections.
The president is right. A new era has started. It’s an era of even bigger government.
Bush claimed he was a “compassionate conservative.” That always sounded a bit contradictory.
Another contradiction was his fiscal policy. He acted as both a supply sider and a Keynesian. The recession he inherited on coming into office seemed to need some response from DC. Bush was bi-partisan in allowing the economic stimulus of deficit spending to run concurrent with tax cuts to stimulate consumption and investment.
The results were constant deficits that ran a bit over the overall growth of GDP and population when averaged over his 8 years.
I would have settled for the just the tax cuts, thank you.