Tag Archives: health care reform

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently published an analysis of U.S. budget deficits through the next decade, based largely upon CBO reporting. It’s worth having a look at it, because it illustrates very clearly which major budget components will be contributing to the deficit during that period.

Although the modern Svengali we call the GOP has mesmerized half the electorate into believing that Democratic programs like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Health Care Reform bill that just passed Congress make up for the majority of the deficit, even a cursory review of the attached graph guts that assumption like a dead fish. In fact, our projected budget deficits for the next decade break down pretty unflatteringly for our Republican friends:

Some critics charge that the new policies pursued by President Obama and the 111th Congress caused the huge federal budget deficits that the nation now faces. In fact, the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the economic downturn together explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years (see Figure 1).

If not for the tax cuts enacted during the presidency of George W. Bush that Congress did not pay for, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were initiated during that period, and the effects of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression (including the cost of steps necessary to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term.
While President Obama inherited a dismal fiscal legacy, that does not diminish his responsibility to propose policies to address our fiscal imbalance and put the weight of his office behind them. Although policymakers should not tighten fiscal policy in the near term while the economy remains fragile, they and the nation at large must come to grips with the nation’s long-term deficit problem. But we should not mistake the causes of our predicament.

Make no mistake: President Obama owns this deficit now. Its implications were clear before he even began his presidential campaign. But if we ever hope to extract ourselves from our fiscal crisis, and ensure that it never happens again, we need to be clear about its causes, and be guided by them in the future.

Step 1: never voting Republicans back into office ever again.