[Riot]

Your article also says this:

"Earlier this week, the White House revealed that it expects a budget deficit for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 to be nearly $1.6 trillion. That figure was lower than initially projected because the White House scratched out $250 billion that it had initially added to the budget as a bank rescue contingency. The administration ultimately did not ask Congress for that money."

It should be noted that 1.2 trillion of this years deficit of 1.6 trillion was from George Bush, and would be there no matter who the President is now. That leaves 4 billion for this year from Bush, and that 4 billion also includes routine overseas military spending on two wars not asked for by Bush in the budget (that's not the way it's done), but is necessary and approved year-to-year by Congress.

So this year, the current administration has already kept the budget low.

Complaints about debt were ignored when Bush took Clintons' massive budget reductions, that would have left us with no deficit if followed, and ignored them, placing us in massive debt via bad management, tax cuts, two wars.

Then due to the recession, Bush had to initiate TARP funding last fall. Although I agreed with TARP, I didn't care for his rushing it through and giving money away to the banks with virtually zero accountability, but that's what he did. He literally didn't seem to care, as he was leaving office.

Ignoring that this occured, or saying, "it's in the past" is silly, as it comprises virtually all the debt we have now as a country, and is what this and every future administration, no matter the political affiliation, will have to deal with until it's gone.

Bush passed Medicare drug spending recently and never funded it by finding the money anywhere - just added this program to the deficit with no worry about how we would pay for it.

TARP, Medicare - Bush didn't care about "pay as you go" or "zero-based budgeting", where you find money to pay for things before you spend it.

This President at least wants any health care reform to clearly be deficit neutral. That's a huge improvement already.

It's funny, the GOP has a rep for financial conservativism while in office, but looking back at the last 40 years or so, that's a false assumption - the Dems are the ones that spend less money during their terms.

Obama was elected partially, I suspect, as McCain's only comment on the economy was massive tax cuts and that he doesn't "get" the economy, and Obama is far more fiscally conservative than Hillary Clinton when they were discussing what they wanted to accomplish.

It's been very popular to attack the current President so early in his administration about "what might be", rather than what is. And what might be 10 years up the road with the deficit is a notoriously moveable number with unreliable predictability in the past.

I want massive healthcare reform in this country, as we should have gotten that years ago (one of the reasons I voted for Obama) - and then we'll see. Every penny spent on healthcare reform, in my eyes, is worth it for this country.