Tuesday, October 16, 2012

The Truth About the Nation's Budget Deficit

Living in Virginia which is being blanketed by utterly false ads backed by Karl Rove's Crossroads organization hearing the untruths is enough to make one want to vomit.  One of the constant themes is that Obama has INCREASED the nation's budget deficit.  The truth is something far different as shown by the chart above.   Maddow blog summarizes the graphic and actual reality.  Here are brief highlights:

[This chart] starts with the figures released in 2009, when the deficit reached a record high of $1.4 trillion. Why is the column in red? Because, thanks to fiscal years, Obama inherited a deficit of nearly $1.3 trillion from Bush/Cheney the moment he took the oath of office. This year, however, according to the official data published by the Treasury Department, the deficit was $1.089 trillion.

When the president's critics spin this, they'll say, "The deficit was over $1 trillion again," and that will be accurate. What the criticism fails to note, however, is that (a) the deficit is now much smaller than it was when Obama took office; (b) this is the smallest deficit we've seen in four years; (c) this new figure represents an improvement of over $200 billion since last year; and (d) the main drivers of the remaining deficit are Republican policies.

One thing is now synonymous with the Republican Party and its greed and religious extremism driven supporters: LYING.  Constant lying.  So much for the Commandment against lying and bearing false witness. 

1 comment:

alguien said...

thanks, michael, for posting this. i've been screaming about this for about 2 weeks now since the CBO issued its report with these findings.

for some odd reason, no one's been willing to report on it save for a couple of regular diarists on daily kos.

thanks again.