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发帖数: 29846 | 1 The annotated Obama: How 90% of the deficit becomes somebody else's fault.
A question raised by President Obama's immortal line on CBS's "60 Minutes"
on Sunday—"I think that, you know, as President, I bear responsibility for
everything, to some degree"—is what that degree really is. Maybe 70% or 80%
of the buck stops with him? Or is it halfsies?
Nope. Now we know: It turns out the figure is 10%. The other 90% is somebody
else's fault.
This revelation came when Steve Kroft mentioned that the national debt has
climbed 60% on the President's watch. "Well, first of all, Steve, I think it
's important to understand the context here," Mr. Obama replied. Fair enough
, so here's his context in full, with our own annotation and translation
below:
"When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history.1
And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90% of that is as
a consequence of two wars that weren't paid for,2 as a consequence of tax
cuts that weren't paid for,3 a prescription drug plan that was not paid for,
4 and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.5
"Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10% of this
increase in the deficit,6 and we have actually seen the federal government
grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact,
substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald
Reagan or George Bush.7"
***
Footnote No. 1: Either Mr. Obama inherited the largest deficit in American
history or he won the 1944 election, but both can't be true. The biggest
annual deficit the modern government has ever run was in 1943, equal to 30.3
% of the economy, to mobilize for World War II. The next biggest years were
the following two, at 22.7% and 21.5%, to win it.
The deficit in fiscal 2008 was a mere 3.2% of GDP. The deficit in fiscal
2009, which began on October 1, 2008 and ran through September 2009, soared
to 10.1%, the highest since 1945.
Mr. Obama wants to blame all of that on his predecessor, and no doubt the
recession that began in December 2007 reduced revenues and increased
automatic spending "stabilizers" like jobless insurance. But Mr. Obama
conveniently forgets a little event in February 2009 known as the "stimulus"
that increased spending by a mere $830 billion above the normal baseline.
The recession ended in June 2009, but spending has still kept rising. The
President has presided over four years in a row of deficits in excess of $1
trillion, and the spending baseline going forward into his second term is
nearly $1.1 trillion more than in fiscal 2007.
Federal spending as a share of GDP will average 24.1% over his first term
including 2013. Even if you throw out fiscal 2009 and blame that entirely on
Mr. Bush, the Obama spending average will be 23.8% of GDP. That compares to
a post-WWII average of a little under 20%. Spending under Mr. Bush averaged
20.1% including 2009, and 19.6% if that year is left out.
Footnotes No. 2 through 4: Liberals continue to claim that the main causes
of the current fiscal mess are tax rates established in, er, 2001 and 2003
and the post-9/11 wars on terror. But by 2006 and 2007, those tax rates were
producing revenue of 18.2% and 18.5% of GDP, near historic norms.
Another quandary for Mr. Obama's apologists is that he has endorsed nearly
all of these policies. The 2003 Medicare drug benefit wasn't offset by tax
hikes or spending cuts, but Democrats expanded the program as part of
ObamaCare.
The President also extended all the Bush tax rates in 2010 for two more
years in the name of helping the economy, and he now wants to continue them
for people earning under $200,000, which is where 71% of their "cost"
resides. The Iraq campaign was won and beginning to be wound down when he
took office, and he himself surged more troops in Afghanistan.
Footnote No. 5: Mr. Obama keeps dining out on the excuse of the recession,
but that ended halfway through his first year. The main deficit problems
since 2009 are a permanently higher spending base (see Footnote No. 1) and
the slowest economic recovery in modern history. Revenues have remained
below 16% of the economy, compared to 18% to 19% in a normal expansion.
The 2008 crisis is long over. The crisis now is Mr. Obama's non-recovery.
Footnote No. 6: Even at face value, Mr. Obama's suggestion that he is "only"
responsible for 10% of what the government does is ludicrous. Note that in
addition to his stimulus, what he calls "emergency actions" include his new
health-care entitlement that will cost taxpayers $200 billion per year when
fully implemented and grow annually at 8%, even using low-ball assumptions.
But the larger point concerns executive leadership. Every President "
inherits" a government that was built over generations, which he chooses to
change, or not to change, to suit his priorities. Mr. Obama chose to see the
government he inherited and grow it faster than any President since LBJ.
The pre-eminent political question now is whether to reform the government
we have to make it affordable going forward, or to keep growing the
government and raise taxes to finance it, if that is even possible.
Mr. Obama favors the second option, though he pretends he can merely tax the
rich to do it. Nobody who has looked honestly at the numbers believes that
—not his own Simpson-Bowles commission and not the Congressional "super
committee" he sanctioned but then worked to undermine.
At every turn he has demagogued the Romney-Ryan proposals to modernize the
entitlement state so it is affordable, and he personally blew up the "grand
bargain" House Speaker John Boehner was willing to strike last summer.
Footnote No. 7: Mr. Obama's posture as the tightest skinflint since
Eisenhower is a tutorial in how to dissemble with statistics. The growth
rate seems low because he's measuring from the end of fiscal 2009, after a
one-year spending increase of $535 billion. That is the year of his stimulus
and thus spending is growing off a much higher base. The real annual pace
of government growth is closer to 5%, and that doesn't count ObamaCare.
***
In another news-making bit with "60 Minutes," which the program decided not
to air, Mr. Obama conceded that "Do we see sometimes us going overboard in
our campaign, mistakes that are made, areas where there's no doubt that
somebody could dispute how we are presenting things, that happens in
politics."
Note the passive voice, as if the President's re-election campaign is
disembodied from the President. If Mr. Obama's campaign seems dishonest
enough that even Mr. Obama is forced to admit it, this is because it's
coming from the top.
A version of this article appeared September 25, 2012, on page A18 in the U.
S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The 10% President. |
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