I really don’t have the stomach for it today (a surgeon’s scalpel yesterday is but one reason) but I would love to write a 500 word post that I could send to the Grey Skank, America’s paper of record, and see as an op-ed.   Those 500 words would lay out the numbers, in the frame of that Political Research post of the other day.  The numbers need to be laid out as simply and directly as possible, and be from a source like the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

They would provide a quick view of  the last twelve years of the budget deficit.   Every year’s deficit, it appears, gets added to the national debt, a sum now over fifteen trillion dollars.  When George W. Bush became president, for example, there was a record budget surplus of  236.4 billion dollars $236,400,000,000.00.  I am relying on this website as my source, though I have no idea who Dave Maunel is, except that his site, according to him, is referenced by the NY Times, PBS, CNNMoney.com and others.  Suspiciously missing from his list are such trusted news sources as Fox News and The Onion.  The reader should take that into account.

But if we take Dave Manuel’s numbers as true, and we assume the NY Times would fact check an op-ed at least as scrupulously as they checked Judith Miller’s stories about Saddam having WMD, we see that in the first year of President George W. Bush’s administration there was a surplus of 127.3 billion or $127,300,000,000.00, more than half of the surplus of the year before.   The following year, as the War on Terror began, and the first round of The Bush Tax Cuts kicked in, there was a record budget swing of  285.1 billion dollars.  The deficit for fiscal 2002 was 157 billion dollars.

It is hard to conceptualize how much money a billion dollars is.  Take a minute to look at this wonderful animation to get an idea, on the way to a trillion, in stacks of hundreds.

The Bush administration, never running a deficit lower than 162 billion, set a record for U.S. budget deficits in 2008, 455 billion dollars.  It would seem that Bush’s $700,000,000,000.00 stimulus package (TARP) to Wall Street, to prevent its collapse after the mortgage backed derivatives scandal, was not included in that 2008 deficit.  If it had been part of the 2008 fiscal budget, it would have more than doubled the 2008 deficit, to well over a trillion dollars.

Then we have President Barack Hussein Obama, who, although unanimously opposed by Republicans, doubled down on the TARP bailout, and promptly shattered the record deficit of his predecessor by racking up an unconscionable 1.42 trillion dollar deficit for fiscal 2009.  Let’s look at that one in numbers:  $1,416,000,000,000.  Nuff said?

Till the next time, boys and girls.

(454 words)