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This chart contradicts everything Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan argue about Obama’s responsibility to adding to our national debt.
Notice the section in gray on the right. Notice how the blue line, which represents government spending, sharply rises and the red line, which represents government revenue, slips downward. That gray section represents the recession, under which George W. Bush presided, and his budget, which bleeds into the first 8 months of the first year of Obama’s presidency.
Certainly Obama didn’t do much to pull back after that massive spending spike, but you notice that the spending begins to flatten and even fall, and revenues begin to once again rise.
Let’s also look at what spending is included in that increase to the debt: (chart courtesy of The New York Times)
You can argue that Obama did not bother to end some of the spending that Bush started, extending Bush tax cuts, continuing to fight a war in Afghanistan, etc, but the bulk of the debt and the spending we’re still adding to the deficit was started under Bush.
So, if you want to have an honest conversation about Obama’s spending, it would be more accurate to say, why hasn’t he done more to end the policies that his predecesor started and how realistic is it to end those policies without the approval of a Congress that has a leader, Mitch McConnell who has explicitly stated his purpose is to see that the President fails? -
![reuters:
Amazon is working hard to limit the amount of states requiring the collection of sales tax on online purchases. The company recently struck a deal with the state of Texas in which the state agreed to delay the collection of sales tax. [REUTERS]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3ar76pZ5k1qmaoalo1_1280.jpg "http://soupsoup.tumblr.com/post/22156530477/reuters-amazon-is-working-hard-to-limit-the")
Amazon is working hard to limit the amount of states requiring the collection of sales tax on online purchases. The company recently struck a deal with the state of Texas in which the state agreed to delay the collection of sales tax. [REUTERS]
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Republicans — and even some Democrats — think that the Obama administration lives to collect revenue. The truth is closer to the opposite. Senior administration aides view the expiration of the Bush tax cuts as less of an opportunity than a chore. About four-fifths of the cuts go to households making less than $250,000 a year, and they don’t want to raise taxes on those folks. They don’t like the politics of the issue, either. It’s an article of faith among Democratic strategists that debates on taxes inevitably favor Republicans, allowing Democrats to be hammered from the right and undermined from the left. White House aides would rather focus on “win the future” issues like infrastructure, education and energy.
The White House’s strategy in the debt-ceiling negotiations has reflected its ambivalence, with Obama trying to extract either as much revenue as Republicans would allow or as little as Democrats would accept. Obama even offered Boehner a deal in which the Bush tax cuts would be extended right now, so Republicans wouldn’t have to fear a subsequent negotiation in which they lacked leverage. Boehner rejected that deal and, in doing, might have saved the safety net.
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Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin: Americans would be outraged about the truth of capital gains
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“The revenue track under Reagan looks a lot like the track under Bush: a drop in revenues, then a resumption of growth, but no return to the previous trend. This is exactly what you would expect to see if supply-side economics were just plain wrong: revenues are permanently reduced relative to what they would otherwise have been.” -Paul Krugman
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I know Douthat has an income substantially higher than $94,000. So perhaps we shouldn’t expect him to be familiar with the basics of median family income and how the tax code works.
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Maybe Tax Day’s not so bad—if you run a giant corporation. Check out more amazing tax-day charts here, from MoJo’s Dave Gilson.
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