It is really pretty simple.
First, conservatives vehemently defend Ronald Reagan, but refuse to acknowledge Reagan switched our government from tax and spend to borrow and spend. And of course they refuse to own the debt those tax cuts produced.
Second, debt does not get 'zeroed out' with each new administration. You need to understand the difference between 'debt' and 'deficits'.
"The excuse cannot be used that Congress massively increased Reagan's budget proposals. On the contrary, there was never much difference between Reagan's and Congress's budgets, and despite propaganda to the contrary, Reagan never proposed a cut in the total budget."
Murray N. Rothbard - former Dean of the Austrian School, an economist, economic historian, and libertarian political philosopher
"The debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."
David Stockman - Director of the Office of Management and Budget for U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
"Grover Norquist has no plan to pay this debt down. His plan says you continue to add to the debt..."
Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.)
“Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. Reagan was an ideological inflection point, ending a 50-year liberal ascendancy and beginning a 30-year conservative ascendancy."
Charles Krauthammer
Are you still blathering about this? There hadnt been a balanced budget since JFK was in office. ANd if Reagan was bad witha billion dollar deficit, what does that say about Obama and a trillion dollar deficit?
And there hasn't been a smaller government spender in the White House since Eisenhower.
Who Is The Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower? Would You Believe It's Barack Obama?
Amidst all the cries of
Barack Obama being the most prolific big government spender the nation has ever suffered,
Marketwatch is reporting that our president has actually been tighter with a buck than any United States president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Who knew?
Check out the chart –
Republicans managed to persuade Americans to buy into the whole “Obama as big spender” narrative?
It might have something to do with the first year of the Obama presidency where the federal budget
increased a whopping 17.9% —going from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. I’ll bet you think that this is the result of the Obama sponsored stimulus plan that is so frequently vilified by the conservatives…but you would be wrong.
The first year of any incoming president term is saddled—for better or for worse—with the budget set by the president whom immediately precedes the new occupant of the White House. Indeed, not only was the 2009 budget the property of George W. Bush—and passed by the 2008 Congress—it was in effect four months before Barack Obama took the oath of office.
Accordingly, the first budget that can be blamed on our current president began in 2010 with the budgets running through and including including fiscal year 2013 standing as charges on the Obama account, even if a President Willard M. Romney takes over the office on January 20, 2013.
So, how do the actual Obama annual budgets look?
Courtesy of
Marketwatch-
- In fiscal 2010 (the first Obama budget) spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion.
- In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion.
- In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August.
- Finally in fiscal 2013 — the final budget of Obama’s term — spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion. Read the CBO’s latest budget outlook.
Who Is The Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower Would You Believe It s Barack Obama - Forbes
This lie has been debunked many times over and over again. It relies on using Bush’s MASSIVE bailout spending as Obama’s baseline. That is ignorant as hell considering the huge expansion of government spending that year.
Facts are "ignorant as hell"?
The first year of any incoming president term is saddled—for better or for worse—with the budget set by the president whom immediately precedes the new occupant of the White House. Indeed, not only was the 2009 budget the property of George W. Bush—and passed by the 2008 Congress—it was in effect four months before Barack Obama took the oath of office.
Most of the spending in Obama's term is either directly related to the severe recession Obama inherited or automatic, not discretionary.
Automatic expenditure (not surprisingly!) is expenditure that happens automatically. In other words, the government doesn't have exact control over the level of this type of expenditure. The most obvious example of this is spending on benefits. The government sets regulations for who is entitled to benefits, and it sets the level of the benefits. However, the one thing that it cannot dictate is the number of people who may then be entitled to them as this will often depend on the state of the economy. As the economy goes into recession and people lose their jobs, more people will be entitled to benefits. This will mean government expenditure will rise - not because the government chose to spend more, but simply because of the state of the economy. This spending is therefore automatic spending.
Discretionary spending is, by contrast, spending the government
chooses to make. In a time of recession, it may choose to spend more to try to boost the level of aggregate demand and therefore equilibrium output. At other times, it may choose to lower the level of expenditure to avoid
'crowding out' private sector spending. Either way, it is operating a
discretionary fiscal policy.
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