The St. Petersburg Times’s PolitiFact did note,
What’s the Problem, Exaggeration or Expenditure?
This article appeared on Britannica Blog on June 6, 2011.
Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann have both said in recent days that, as Palin put it, “Look at the debt that has been accumulated in the last two years. It’s more debt under this president than all those other presidents combined.” And they’ve both been rapped by journalistic fact‐checkers.
Palin would have been correct if she had said the same thing that Rep. Eric Cantor, R‐Va., said last fall, that “the budget submitted by Obama will add more to the debt than the outstanding debt of the previous 43 presidents combined.”
But that’s not what she said. The gross federal debt was $10.6 trillion when President Obama took office, and it has risen by $3.7 trillion in just over two years. That’s a lot, but it’s not more than all previous presidents combined. The comparison would be a little closer if we assumed that Palin meant the publicly held debt, which was $6.3 trillion when Obama took office and has risen by $3.4 trillion. The previous record‐holder for debt accumulation was George W. Bush, who increased the total debt by $5 trillion in eight years. Obama is on track to leave that record in the dust.
Of course, it’s not fair to blame a new president for the debt that starts accumulating the day he takes office. My Cato Institute colleague Daniel J. Mitchell has argued that most of the massive 2009 deficit really belongs to Bush, since the fiscal year began October 1, 2008, the season of bailouts and takeovers. Of course, Sen. Barack Obama supported all of those emergency expenditures, but it was the Bush administration that led the way. Back in 2007 I deplored the fact that President Bush had increased federal spending by a trillion dollars in six years — from under $2 trillion when he took office to almost $3 trillion in fiscal year 2008.
Bush was the biggest spender since Lyndon B. Johnson; in the sheer magnitude of his spending and deficits, the biggest spender — and biggest taxer — ever. President Obama denounced Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility, then came into office and immediately started spending more. First there was the $787 billion “stimulus” bill, then a few weeks later the $410 billion “omnibus spending bill,” then a continuing push to keep federal expenditures sharply higher than they were late in the Bush spending spree. And a projected increase in the national debt of $5 trillion more than the baseline.
So what’s the real problem here? Is it Bachmann’s and Palin’s exaggeration of Obama’s record on deficits and debt? Or is it President Obama’s unsustainable spending? I’ve been pretty critical of Palin, and she’s kept fact checkers busy during her bus tour. But the problem that actually matters is that we’re spending ourselves into national bankruptcy.
Thirty years ago, after 190 years of federal spending, the national debt was $1 trillion. Today it’s more than $14 trillion. And all without a major war or depression. We’re not in Greek territory yet, but we’re on that path. That’s the problem the media should focus on.