James Glassman, the executive director of the George W. Bush Institute and a Forbes contributor, has written a piece on the facts about budget deficits and how various presidents truly rank.
The inspiration for Glassman’s piece was a comment by former Governor Howard Dean, who was asked what specific policies in the Bush administration he thinks are still being used to explain an unemployment rate of more than eight percent. To which Dean responded, “The biggest ones are the deficits that were run up…. The deficits were enormous.”
All of which caused Glassman to do something that Dean did not: consult the facts in various economic reports. Here is the key paragraph:
As for spending itself, during the George W. Bush years (2001-08), federal outlays averaged 19.6 percent of GDP, a little less than during the Clinton years (1993-2000), at 19.8 percent and far below Reagan, whose outlays never dropped below 21 percent of GDP in any year and averaged 22.4 percent. Even factoring in the TARP year (2009), Bush’s average outlays as a proportion of the economy was 20.3 percent – far below Reagan and only a half-point below Clinton. As for Obama, even excluding 2009, his spending has averaged 24.1 percent of GDP – the highest level for any three years since World War II.
I would only add that under Bush the deficit fell to 1 percent of GDP ($162 billion) by 2007, the penultimate year of the Bush presidency.
As for the financial crisis of 2008, which obviously had a significant effect on the budget deficit, Democrats bear the majority of the blame for blocking reforms that could have mitigated the effects of the housing crisis, which in turn led to the broader financial crisis.
As Stuart Taylor put it in 2008:
The pretense of many Democrats that this crisis is altogether a Republican creation is simplistic and dangerous. It is simplistic because Democrats have been a big part of the problem, in part by supporting governmental distortions of the marketplace through mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose reckless lending practices necessitated a $200 billion government rescue [in September 2008]. … Fannie and Freddie appear to have played a major role in causing the current crisis, in part because their quasi-governmental status violated basic principles of a healthy free enterprise system by allowing them to privatize profit while socializing risk.
The Bush administration warned as early as April 2001 that Fannie and Freddie were too large and overleveraged and that their failure “could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting federally insured entities and economic activity” well beyond housing. Bush’s plan would have subjected Fannie and Freddie to the kinds of federal regulation that banks, credit unions, and savings and loans have to comply with. In addition, Republican Richard Shelby, then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, pushed for comprehensive GSE (government-sponsored enterprises) reform in 2005. And who blocked these efforts at reforming Fannie and Freddie? Democrats such as Senator Christopher Dodd and Representative Barney Frank, along with the then-junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who backed Dodd’s threat of a filibuster (Obama was the third-largest recipient of campaign gifts from Fannie and Freddie employees in 2004).
So the current president and his party bear a substantial (though not exclusive) responsibility in creating the economic crisis that Obama himself inherited.
In any event, Jim Glassman has performed a useful public service, if only in deploying (to paraphrase Thomas Huxley) a few fiscal facts to slay a beautiful, if false, deduction.
This is exactly the kind of thing Romney needs to attack Obama on. Yes, call him a liar — but use examples like this article (and toss in that when Romney's President the buck will stop at his desk with him)!
The only valid point to your argument is this: "In fact, for much of the 2000s, Frank had no power to 'kill[]' measures — Republicans controlled the House and could have passed legislation regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the House without any Democratic support …." The problem is that you are then concluding (and admittedly I'm reading into your post what the standard Obama argument is …) Bush did it all! n nThe Dem catchphrase is the failed policies of the past (see Reid, see Pelosi, see Obama). You're also ignoring that the deficits have been completely misrepresented as if the 2009 TARP bailout which the both-Houses-Dem Congress passed occurred in every single year of Bush's term of office instead of occurring every single year of Obama's term of office. n nBut, let's note: It's been stated at Commentary before that the Treasury Secretary may have brought it up early, but that Bush himself was taking pride in the increased number of first time home buyers among low income Americans. Bush can't, then, escape part of the blame. n nStill, how can the Democrats, when they controlled Congress and the brewing mess wasn't being mentioned as something to do something about, but was being blasted by Treasury and the White House and carried on the news as a looming crisis, and Frank and Dodd THEN did nothing except attack Bush and Treasury, not get even a teensy bit of blame? n
Media Matters is eminently dispensable. They are partisan hacks over there, and you are shamelessly ignorant to believe you may cite them on any topic and nobody will object. n nYet worse than that is your failure even to understand the point at issue in the instant post, which is: "'The failed policies of the past' are exclusively the policies of George W. Bush." That is so obviously false that I cannot believe that anyone could avow it with a straight face. Yet that is what you and Media Manglers would have us accept full stop. n nDo you seriously believe that the pathetic little blurb you proffered is absolutely ALL that needs saying about those fabled "failed policies," policies that in their heart, soul, and inspiration are part of the age-old and by now generic Democratic Party swindle, which is to say, buy votes with other people's money? Giving people a house is on a continuum with giving people food stamps, the salient difference, with regards to which Democrats in particular are as blind as bats, being that the misallocation of resources that follows on passing out food stamps to people who frequently shouldn't have them is, as a matter of dollars and cents, a mere rounding error compared to the trouble one can get into by giving someone who doesn't deserve one a 60-ton house! n nBy "doesn't deserve one," I mean someone who doesn't deserve a mortgage absent a government policy of ignoring whether or not he has a down-payment or assets or even a job, stuff like that. Basically it was "Library card? That'll do." Those are PATENTLY INSANE POLICIES instigated by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac starting around 1995. Moreover, they have the DNA of the Democratic Party, particularly the Congressional Black Caucus, all over them. The latter posse of vermin could be counted on to shriek "Racism!" or "Racist!" like all the demons from hell in chorus combined were the flow of mortgages into "minority" communities even glanced at sideways. That was not a matter of speculation. It happened. So who needed such a headache? Certainly not George W. Bush, which is not to excuse at all his buying into something as foolhardy as the "ownership society" (also known as the Land of Oz) on the scale that he did. n nSuch obstinate recklessness in the pursuit of bribing the electorate goes back to Jimmy Carter and his Democratic Congress' Community Reinvestment Act of 1978, really accelerated under Bill Clinton and his Democratic and Republican Congresses goading Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy more votes more and more quickly, and reached an unholy crescendo under George W. Bush and his Democratic and Republican Congresses. By the way, because of Jim Jeffords, a Vermont RINO who caucused with the Dingbats, the Republicans did not control the Senate from Jan 2001 to Jan 2003, something often conveniently ignored. Nor did they ever have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Recall that blackguard, Harry Reid, extolling the filibuster as the guarantor of democracy back in 2007, do you? n nBut go right ahead, ignore everything in Wehner's post, offer up, like a blindman selling a cheap pencil, what is in effect a press release from the DNC, or better, like one of those shifty creeps who works days at Media Matters handing out "Girls! Girls! Girls! We Got 'Em!" leaflets in front of a strip club.
Do your budget deficit figures for the Bush administrations include the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which were not included in the budgets?
I would be happy to hear what and how much wasn't included in the deficits, which are figured not just from the budget but the appropriations along the way, including military spending, all the way to the end of the year. Even now, with Reid and Obama not even passing a budget, they can't hide the trillion dollar deficits year after year after year. I mean, are you saying that the Democrats, when Bush was President, were concealing the amount of money the war was costing? I don't think so — just consider how the MSM is concealing the fact that more Americans were killed in Afghanistan in Obama's 3 years than in Bush's 7 years there (no way will you convince me that Democrats and the MSM got together to conceal from the public what the war cost)!