With President Barack Obama’s big economic address to a joint session of Congress tonight, lines like this in mainstream news stories are appearing with distressing predictability.
“The president’s budget proposal will project that the estimated $1.3 trillion deficit inherited from the Bush administration will be halved to $533 billion by 2013, or from 9.2 percent of the gross domestic product to 3 percent, the official said.”
The goal of couse, is to absolve Obama from any complicity in the biggest deficits in U.S. history. But now that his staggeringly large $787 billion dollar “economic stimulus” bill has passed, President Obama cannot escape responsibility for the massively large deficits that will result for years to come.
$1.3 trillion is the deficit for fiscal year 2009, which by the media’s and Democrats’ former standard is the first year of the Obama Administration, not the last year of the Bush Administration. Remember that President Bush gets blamed for causing the deficit to return after the surpluses created by the Republican Congress in the 1990s. Bush is deemed responsible for the fiscal year 2001 deficit, which was the first year of deficits after the Internet bubble burst in 2000 under President Clinton. If Bush is responsible for the last year of Clinton’s presidency, than Obama is responsible for the last year of Bush’s.
