The indispensable Megan McArdle takes a look at the latest effort to blame President Bush for the appalling deficits that President Obama is racking up. (Via Instapundit.) The latest is a piece at the New York Times that takes a look at projected federal deficit over 2009-2012 and examines how that projection has changed from 2000 to today. Not surprisingly, the NYT piece finds the President Bush is to blame for most of the change.
McArdle makes a number of good points. An “under current law” comparison is bogus because it ignores changes that everyone knows are going to be made. For example, the annual AMT fix is going to happen, and the government is always going to spend whatever surplus it acquires. She also points out that it’s nonsensical to blame Bush (from the left anyway) for spending increases that Democrats attacked as insufficient.
But I think McArdle didn’t clearly make the central point (although her “under current law” critique gets at it). All the NYT piece does is compare fantasies. It takes a four-year period (2009-2012), three years of which have not been budgeted yet, and examines how projections of that period changed from 2000 to today.
We make a big show of making multi-year budget projections, but we budget just one year at a time. A spending plan for 2009 written in 2000 had nothing to do with reality. Likewise a spending plan for 2012 written in 2009 has nothing to do with reality.
President Obama tells us that we’re going to spend an insane amount of money this year and next, but then we’re going to start paring it back. (Diet starts tomorrow!) When you average out all four years, it doesn’t look as bad (particularly if you use OMB numbers). That’s what the NYT piece does to minimize Obama’s deficit impact.
Who actually believes that the President and the Democratic Congress, after spending trillions on ever liberal hobby horse and pork barrel, are really going to start dramatically cutting spending next year? I sure don’t.
The only reality is years that are already budgeted. Everything else is fantasy. As it happens, both Bush and Obama submitted budgets for 2009 and we can compare them. Bush’s 2009 budget was based on revenue predictions before the financial crisis, so we have to discard its bottom line, but we can still look at what would have happened under his spending plan, and compare it to Obama’s spending plan.
As I calculated here in March, Bush’s austerity budget cut spending (from the baseline) and would have ended with a $1 trillion deficit. Obama’s “stimulus” budget increased spending and would have ended with a $1.75 trillion deficit. (We’ll accept the OMB numbers for present purposes.) Something close to Obama’s budget was enacted by Congress.
President Obama has nearly doubled the deficit in one year. That’s the reality. He says that he’ll start cutting it soon. That’s fantasy.
Internet Scofflaw 
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