One of the last handful of honest conservatives, Bruce Bartlett
@ NYTs, looks back at the Bush-induced "Obama" deficits:
On Dec. 20, the Brookings Institution economist Justin Wolfers sent out this provocative post
on Twitter: “The decline in the budget deficit since 2009 is the
largest four-year improvement since the demobilization from WWII.”
I was aware that the deficit was declining sharply, both in nominal
terms and as a share of the gross domestic product, but hadn’t thought
much about the magnitude. Mr. Wolfers, whose partner Betsey Stevenson is
a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, is correct,
as the data show. Fiscal year 2014 began on Oct. 1.
Congressional Budget Office
The Congressional Budget Office further projects that the deficit
will fall to just 2.1 percent of G.D.P. in fiscal year 2015, less than
it was in fiscal year 2008, when it was 3.1 percent of G.D.P. Thus we
will have seen a decline in the deficit of 7.7 percent of G.D.P. over
seven years.
There is indeed no comparable period in which the deficit fell as much
since the aftermath of World War II for the simple reason that the
deficit never grew large enough to drop so much. The largest deficit
recorded in the postwar era before 2009 was in 1983, when it reached 6
percent of G.D.P.
After the war, the deficit fell to 7.7 percent in 1946 from 22 percent
of G.D.P. in 1945. A surplus of 1.2 percent of G.D.P. was achieved in
1947.
This got me thinking about President Obama’s budgetary record when viewed from 2009. I turned first to the last C.B.O. projection of the George W. Bush administration,
which was made on Jan. 7, 2009, and thus includes no Obama policies.
The decline in the deficit after 2010 is largely attributable to the
assumed expiration of the Bush tax cuts, because the C.B.O. must assume
current law and they were set to expire at the end of 2010.
Congressional Budget Office
What’s important to see is that the federal government was going to
run the largest deficit since World War II in fiscal year 2009, which
began on Oct. 1, 2008, regardless of who became president on Jan. 20,
2009. It was baked in the cake by policies put in place by the Bush
administration and the natural rise in spending and fall in revenues
resulting from a sharp drop in economic growth and rise in unemployment,
which economists call “automatic stabilizers.”
This point was always known by anyone who bothered to look carefully
at the data, regardless of how many hand-wringers on both sides of the
aisle acted as if the deficit was solely a result of President Obama’s
policies. Both because of myopia and because everyone tends to invest
the president with far more power than he actually has, there is a
tendency to assume that whatever happens on his watch is attributable
solely to him.
