Bush got us into this mess | Letter to the Editor
Published 4:21 pm Tuesday, April 10, 2012
While I agree with Anne Peck’s inference that Sen. Sharon Nelson wrongly blames the minority Republican party for the legislature’s budget failure, Ms. Peck is guilty of the same line of convenient but faulty analysis when she switches to the federal budget. She attempts to blame the Obama administration for being more fiscally irresponsible than its predecessor George Bush, but the facts are not that simple.
Presidents are often blamed for running up the deficit, but the truth is Congress sets the budget, hopefully before the fiscal year ends Oct. 1, so incoming presidents have little influence on spending for about a year. When George Bush took office, the ongoing national debt was in the range of $5.5 to $6 trillion; when he left office it had nearly doubled to approximately $11 trillion. Since Barack Obama has been in office, it has increased to some $16 trillion, but the real question is just whose policies have contributed to these big increases. There’s little argument that the significant increase of over a trillion dollars a year since 2001 is threatening our economic system. But bear in mind that when comparing Bush to Obama, 37 percent of these annual increases can be attributed to the business cycle recession (tax revenues have declined dramatically); another 33 percent to policies enacted under George Bush (tax cuts, Medicare Part D, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan); 20 percent to these same policies enacted under Bush but continued under Obama; and approximately 10 percent for new policies enacted during Obama’s first three years.
We can’t seem to make any headway in solving the budgetary crises in either Olympia or Washington, DC due to the willingness of both sides to distort the numbers to gain political advantage. At the federal level, both parties seem to intentionally and irresponsibly cut taxes so that come election time the resulting ballooning deficits can be blamed on the other party.
— Charlie Peterson
