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The Mess Bush Left Us?
The Washington Post babbled again recently about Obama's inheriting a huge deficit from Bush. Amazingly enough,...... a lot of people swallow this nonsense. So once more, a short civics lesson.
Budgets do not come from the White House. They come from Congress, and the party that has controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democrat Party. They controlled the budget process for FY 2008 and FY 2009, as well as FY 2010 and FY 2011. In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases.
For FY 2009 though, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the FY 2009 budgets. Remember?
And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills. He signed the omnibus bill as President to complete FY 2009. Let's remember what the deficits looked like during that period: (below)
If the Democrats
inherited any deficit, it was the FY 2007 deficit, the last of the
Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in five years, and
the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, Democrats
in Congress took control of spending, and that includes Barack Obama,
who voted for the budgets. If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it
from himself.
In a nutshell, when
Obama says he inherited a huge deficit, what he
is saying is "I inherited a deficit that I voted for and then I voted to
expand that deficit four-fold since January 20th."