Thanks for posting that. The chart originated with the New York Times and is so striking that a lot of political and economic columnist have posted it and posted about it. Not including any Rupert Murdoch media like the Wall Street Journal or Fox since they do not feel any obligation to deal in facts. Jonathan Cohn at the New Republic had some context setting comments:
"By the end of the 1990s, the federal budget was in surplus for the first time in decades. Partly that was a product of unusually strong economic growth, during the internet boom, which had swelled tax revenues. But partly that was a product of responsible budgeting, presided over by the most recent two presidents, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. In order to reduce deficits, lawmakers and those two presidents had agreed both to raise taxes and to reduce spending.
In the 2000 campaign, Clinton's would-be successor, Al Gore, campaigned on a promise to, in effect, put those surpluses aside for a rainy day. Bush would have none of it. The government had too much money, he said; the responsible thing was to give it all back to the taxpayers. In office, he did just that, presiding over massive tax cuts that gave, by far, the largest benefits to the very wealthy. Bush promised that the tax cuts would act like a "fiscal straightjacket," preventing government from growing. But then he, and his allies, launched two major wars and enacted a drug benefit for Medicare, all without paying for them.
Today's fiscal gap is largely a product of those decisions, as the graph above shows. It has very little to do with anything Obama did while in office. In fact, the contrast between the two administrations could not be more striking. Obama's primary undertaking has been comprehensive health care reform. But he insisted that it pay for itself, through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases."
Some of the comments there were interesting:
"I mean, how can you advocate NOW for a balanced budget, if when your party was in power you unbalanced the budget by 5 trillion dollars? There's only one way, ignore reality and blame it all on Obama. After all, they unbalanced the budget in the first place to justify(claiming) that we can't afford Social Security."
And,
"I've never been able to fathom why Obama and the Democrats have been so pathetically inept at countering the charge that the massive deficits we're forced to deal with are the fault of the present administration. Why hasn't Obama gone on national television with a chart like this one and shown the American people where the fault really lies? Instead, he just makes vague statements about the mess he inherited. The Republicans counter with the charge that Obama is trying to evade his culpability and that the deficits are due to the Democrats' "out-of-control spending." Ross Perot showed that you can achieve a lot of traction with charts. Show, don't just tell, and maybe people will understand where the blame lies."
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-coh...timulus-health
Chart of the Day
