Economic History 101: WaPo Blames Bush...again

The Washington Post babbled again today about Obama inheriting a huge deficit from Bush. Amazingly enough, a lot of people swallow this BULL. So once more, a short civics lesson

Budgets do not come from the White House. They come from Congress and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democratic Party.

Furthermore, the Democrats controlled the budget process for FY 2008 & FY 2009 as well as FY 2010 & FY 2011. (FY = fiscal year)

In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases.

For FY 2009 though, Nancy Pelosi

& Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until

Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the FY 2009 budgets.  And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete FY 2009. Let's remember what the deficits looked like during that period: (below)

If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the FY 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in five years and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, Democrats in Congress took control of spending, including Barack Obama, who voted for the budgets.

If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it from himself.

In a nutshell, what Obama is saying is I inherited a deficit that I voted for and then I voted to expand that deficit four-fold since January 20th.

Submitted by a regular reader,  who asks to remain anonymous.