NoTeaPartyPleez
Gold Member
- Dec 2, 2012
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And it’s also untrue — as claimed in a graphic widely circulated by email and in social media postings — that the debt has increased more under Obama than under all previous 43 presidents combined. In fact, as of Jan. 31, 2012, the rise under Obama had yet to surpass the rise under his predecessor, George W. Bush.
The figures in that graphic are pure fabrications, as anyone can easily confirm by plugging Obama’s inauguration date — Jan. 20, 2009 — in the Treasury Department’s handy “debt to the penny” website. That shows the nation’s total debt stood at $10.6 trillion on the day Obama took office (not $6.3 trillion), and it had increased to nearly $15.4 trillion by the end of January 2012 — a rise of more than $4.7 trillion in just over three years (not $6.5 trillion).
What other president increased the debt by nearly $5 trillion in 3 years?
But, no problem. When Obama leaves office, we simply tack on the deficit from the Republican's first year in office to Obama's total debt increase and compare it to all the others. Anyone want to take the losing position that it will not be bigger than all the others?
At least 2 trillion of the spending during the Obama presidency has been paying interest on the debt accumulated before Obama took office. No other presidency has ever had to face that ongoing expense.
And he did nothing to curb the accelerated growth of the debt. I would give him a lot of credit if he were to have come out and explained that we would face a few years of large deficits as we worked our way out of the various things we had gotten into, then presented budgets that actually put us on the path back to fiscal sanity, but he did just the opposite. He pushed the spending pedal to the floor and never intends to even try to close the gap. No, he rightly wears the King of Debt crown.
The Afghanistan and Iraq wars went on the national credit card and then deferred to the 2009 books, courtesy of Bush.