Recall that “massive budget deficit!!!” which was to be the death of our nation, as Republicans described it during the 2012 election cycle? Yes, the $1.4 trillion deficit inherited by Obama has been cut by more than half, according to the latest projection, and has all but returned to the size of Bush’s second-to-last budget deficit prior to the global economic meltdown. (See CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION at end of story below for more details.) But it seems, for some reason, the GOP forget to tell people, for some reason…
While the rapidly disappearing deficit seen above is not necessarily a good thing — at least for those interested in putting people back to work and the overall long-term health of the economy that would otherwise come with smart federal investments right now — you’d think Republicans would be celebrating. But, of course, they’re not, because they don’t care now, nor have they ever, about budget deficits — unless they can be used as a blunt object to try and harm their political opponents.
Rachel Maddow offered more last night on the chart above. Video follows below…
CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION 5/20/2013: As commenters have noted, describing “Our Federal Budget Deficit” as having “All But Disappeared”, as the original headline read, is not particularly accurate. Moreover, taken in combination with the chart we used above, from the Rachel Maddow Show, it’s even more misleading, since one has to notice that the chart begins at $500 billion. It’s marked as such, but difficult to notice and, therefore, misleading.
In fact, George W. Bush’s final budget, signed in 2008, was for fiscal year 2008-2009 and led to a deficit of approximately $1.4 trillion, as explained by the conservative Cato Institute that year. The year prior, fiscal year 2007-2008, saw a deficit of approximately $402 billion (the biggest reason, by far, for the jump between Bush’s ’08 and ’09 budgets was the crashed economy and the crash of tax revenues along with it.)
The new projected budget deficit for 2012-13 is now just over $600 billion, an $800 billion reduction since Obama took office or, as Maddow explains in the video above, the “fastest deficit reduction since WWII.” It is already less than half of what it was the year Obama took office and inherited Bush’s final budget, and is on pace to soon fall below Bush’s penultimate budget, the one that he signed prior to the year of the global economic meltdown.
Here is a better chart, also from Maddow (courtesy of Steven Benen at Maddow Blog), produced earlier in the same week, which better reflects the actual deficit, both then and now…
With all of that explained, we have changed the headline of this article to read “Federal Budget Deficit Shrinks by Half Since Obama Took Office” and have modified the text of the article above to more accurately reflect that. We apologies for our hasty error and for the unintended confusion in the bargain.
~Darth Vader
Anyone who thinks debt doesn’t matter is living in some parallel universe where money grows on trees.
A reduction in the “Budget” deficit still leaves the country with a “Deficit”.
While both the Left and the Right are fighting over who spilled the milk and if it really even matters the banks are enslaving our children.
Have you taken a look at our National Debt lately? While a budget deficit reduction may be a bragging point the Debt Clock is still ticking away at neck breaking speed.
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
ServantDujmovJr:
Get a job.
First of all: get a name.
Jesus!
The deficit is dropping rapidly but has not “all but disappeared.” (The bar chart misleadingly starts at $500 billion.) Junior: Before you get too panicked over the debt clock, look at the long-run history. We came out of WW2 with debt much bigger than GDP and had no trouble cutting it to 1/3 GDP by the time Carter left office. Unfortunately Reagan’s embrace of voodoo tax cuts led to a debt explosion only briefly reversed by Clinton’s record surplusses. When the economy is fully back on track we can address the debt again as we successfully have in the past.
Larry – I have never seen a post like yours on a bradblog message board. Not that there haven’t been such posts, but I haven’t seen one before.
Regarding the article, I see two misleading statements. first is the chart, which I would surmise was created by Rachel Maddow’s organization. It truncates the bottom of the chart, making it look like the projected debt for 2013 is miniscule compared to 2009. But it is actually in the range of half of the first year debt.
The second misleading part of the article is the headline, which states the deficit has “all but disappeared” when it is projected to be half of an enormous amount. Many people recognize that enormous by half is still… enormous.
Bill Clinton cut the deficit from about 300B (enormous at the time) to surplus over six years, mostly by the grace of China opening their markets, but also by “reforming” welfare programs, and from tricks like opening up Roth IRAs to investors. It turned out in his era that those reforms, along with the temporary economic stimulus of a growing Chinese market, turned out fine for most people.
Even if you consider that inflation will put those high deficits at the beginning of Clinton’s term into a similar range to the 2013 projection, the deficit has not “all but disappeared.”
It’s another question whether the deficits are what is needed now. Generally, we should be borrowing in downturns, and saving in upturns. But Americans don’t seem to like to do that. Instead, they don’t pay attention and ignorantly give away the store in good times, then try to work their asses off when things go sour. Maybe it isn’t just Americans.
But at some point, we have to realize that the global warming and the economic situation are related, and with the worldwide economies maturing to a point there are fewer potential coerced labor forces (like those in China and, say, Bangladesh), Americans are going to have to either:
1) share the wealth, which means a more permanent cooling of our general economy (fewer clothes, smaller homes and cars, less fancy dining), or
2) kill a lot of people who would otherwise take away our prized privilege.
Don’t worry, if we are to choose no. 1, we don’t have to give up our iphones, those can mostly be made by machines, and they are small, so they should be cheap as hell. But if we were to choose no. 1, maybe we should consider that the economy is where it ought to be in the long term right now, and so the deficit should be lower as well.
That the deficit is down is of no importance to the Christofascist GOP. It never was. Their intent is to replay the Civil War and bring down the Federal government by any means possible. If there was no deficit what so ever the Cons would just find another excuse to rant.
Brad I wish you and the rest of the media would be honest about their intentions. That is all that matters if we want to win the propaganda war.
Silat @6 said:
If I had compelling evidence that that was their purpose, I’d report it as such. I don’t think they want to “bring down the Federal government”, I think they want to take control of it again, so they can use it for an ATM for their friends again.
They may tell you they hate “Big Government”, but the evidence is quite the opposite. They love it. They just don’t care for government when it’s run by Democrats because they don’t get as much free stuff out of it.
Well said Brad!
Cutting it to a “mere” $642,000,000,000.00 ($650 billion) per year, hardly counts as “almost disappeared.” Particularly since that’s more than 1/3 of what it was.
And, given that we have repeatedly complained about “misleading graphs” from Fox and others, the deliberately misleading graph above is purest hypocrisy.
Dexter: WTF are you talking about WRT Larry Bergan? Larry’s been around for a long time and is infinitely more cool than you (or me).
Re: comment (3) and (10)
Larry felt threatened by a reasoned comment at (2), so chose to deride the commenter’s name and purportedly his choice of how he spends his free time at (3). I don’t know Larry, so I don’t know how cool he is, but the comment seems infantile. I haven’t seen that type of comment on Bradblog.
The deficit is created by a difference in revenue vs. spending. We can have a discussion about all these things, but the hating over reasoned comments because it doesn’t stick with “our team’s” flavor of the moment is ignorant thinking.
If, as a nation, we chose to repeal the tax breaks from the Iraq War era, our deficit would be much lower now, in fact, probably a reasonable amount. Income taxes are good for stimulus spending, because it takes from those with a safe situation (a job) and transfers it to those needing help. It takes from savers, who are sequestering their cash, to spenders, who are turning around and putting it right back into the economy.
Wanting to reduce deficits is not an indicator that a person hates black people, and beats their children, or is a stupid cow, or an unemployed lazy dolt. Wanting to hamstring a president to create economic stress in an attempt at grabbing power, that sounds like treason, if there is such a crime.
To those pointing out the misleading chart and error in our original headline on this article, please see the CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION now added at the bottom of the article. Thanks for making noise about it, and my apologies I was unable to correct it until now!