Obama inherited a huge debt of $10 trillion in 2008. Under his watch, it has grown to $16 trillion. Between wails from the Obama campaign about Romney’s tax returns, they also want some policy specifics. Let’s look at the specifics of deficits and the debt.
Since so many people are educated in government schools, a definition of terms is needed so you’ll know the difference between a deficit and the debt. You’ll also be able to tell when you are being lied to where the debt and deficit is concerned.
A ‘deficit’ is the shortfall created when the government spends more in a given year than it collects in taxes and fees. Candidate Obama said that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.
The debt, or national debt, is the sum of all the deficits.
Bush’s last year produced a deficit of over $500 billion dollars. Bringing the national debt up to $10 trillion. To keep his promise, Obama’s deficit this year should be about $250 billion. So much for Obama’s “promise” to reduce the deficit by half, by the end of his first term.
Since Obama has been in office, he has had record deficits with each year being over $1 trillion. Between those annual deficits and legislation like Obamacare, the debt has risen from $10 trillion to $16 trillion during his first term.
No surprise that the Obama campaign and their ‘low information’ supporters believe the President when he says he has a plan to solve the nation’s huge debt problem. He doesn’t, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says so.
In a random act of journalism, AP’s Tom Raum hits the specifics of how both candidates plan to solve the debt crisis.
President Barack Obama has proposed bringing deficits down by slowing spending gradually, to avoid suddenly tipping the economy back into recession.
Translation, they don’t plan on ever spending less than we take in. The ‘slowing spending’ means increasing the debt slower rather than faster. The end result is still increasing the debt. Not reducing it.
Republican candidate Mitt Romney would lower deficits mostly through deep spending cuts, including some of the reductions proposed by his conservative running mate Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee.
Republican’s plan reduces deficits by (wait for it) reducing spending on a schedule that eventually arrives at a balanced budget. Which is the starting point to actually paying down the national debt.
Today’s quiz: Who has a plan for reducing the deficit and debt? Romney or Obama?
Link: WHY IT MATTERS: Debt
Ross, buddy, you forgot that context matters. When you are making claims about what the POTUS said on cutting the deficit and how much was spent without adding that what he said was said before the economy started tanking in 2008.
How could he have been wrong? Well, with Henry Paulson as Secretary of Treasurery for George W. Bush in the begging of the year lying about the shape of the economy after having been CEO of Goldman Sachs from 2000 to 2006 before he joined GWB, we had a government and an economy in crisis. GWB had bad or mis-information that he used to get us into Iraq and he had bad or mis-information that he used to avoid overseeing or regulating our economy.
I realize you are trying to spin it as though all our economic problems are President Obama’s fault, but that just ain’t so.
The right has been spinning the idea that the stimulus failed, but being that Unemployment isn’t 12% and that the stock market is up 6000 points, the math doesn’t match up with the hate, fear and smear bs.
The answer is Obama has been steadily working to grow the economy. Romney’s business experience is to borrow money against businesses, pay himself well, sell off the assets of the business and let it go bankrupt. We had enough of that under GWB.
I like President Clinton’s convention speech about what President Obama has been doing while the Republicans have been obstructing.
It’s on the front page of the DEC website at http://www.escambiademocrats.info if you want to watch it again.