Visualizing Obama Spending Cuts

[Riot]

We went through this before. The producer of the graph is the CBPP a left wing think tank.

LOL - yeah, you complained before. But the graph uses valid CBO numbers. The numbers are not false, and you never discredited those CBO numbers on it.

So what is your point about "left wing think tank"?

By the way, the graph you posted uses CBO numbers, too. And they appear to be rather the same numbers as the graph I posted

Except your graph shows slightly less deficit projection, and is far kinder to Obama's presidency.

But unlike my graph, you didn't reveal what "think tank" created your graph. Where did you get your graph?

Here try this one out. It's simply the deficit.

Why post a graph of just the deficit? Nobody is debating there's a huge deficit, or what those numbers are estimated to be. That wasn't the point of my post.

The point of my graph was to show, not just the amount of the deficit, but where it came from and what spending caused it

If you have a different graph that shows where the deficit came from, what contributed to it, that might be useful for you to post. Rather than just another graph saying we have a deficit.

As you can see, stimulus spending was a very small portion of what contributed to our deficit. And we were in a major recession, on the brink of a depression - every major economist agreed it was needed, and it helped.

The primary cause of our deficit was giving up our income by giving unfunded tax cuts (we kept spending the same amount after our income dropped) and starting two wars that were unfunded, too.

Bush put the vast majority of that deficit on the credit card.

You say why does your graph have the estimate from two years ago getting worse in '09?

Well, your graph is old, it doesn't include the actual from '09. But notice that both graphs agree, and follow the same projection.

But think back, when was the first stimulus approved? November of '08. When were those monies finally spent? Not in the end of '08. They were spent over '09 and '10. When was TARP approved, when was it spent? The bank bailouts?

So that's why the estimate gets worse in '09. The majority of those monies were approved to be spent - dedicated - before Obama was even elected in November.

We can budget cut the heck out of the 14-17% of our budget that is discretionary spending - losing education, losing jobs programs (in a recession? crazy!), losing the EPA, losing the FDA - that's not all we have to do. So add in cutting Medicare & Defense. Still not enough.

Or, we could do it a simple way, not losing any of the above. Let the taxes on the rich - let's go up to over 1 million - go back up. And get out of wars, and cut defense. That's the majority of it.

With that obvious failure behind us let's take a huge breath and return to 2008 spending that many Dems obviously felt was excessive, as a starting point.

You mean spending before the stimulus, TARP, and unfunded wars? The discretionary spending that is only 14-17% of our budget? That is not what caused, or what is continuing to cause, these huge deficits. That's the fallacy of the "just return to 2008 budget" argument - the spending during those years was due to unfunded wars, unfunded tax cuts, then the stimulus and bailouts piled on top of that growing disaster and shortfall. Look at the shortfall over years due just to the Bush tax cuts!

Returning to the level of the small portion of the budget that didn't cause that is nice - but won't help much. Except it does attack the programs conservatives hate (NPR, EPA, education, police, teachers, etc)

See the white area on the bottom of my graph? The "deficit without these factors" area? That's what that discretionary budget covers. That's what the GOP and the Dems are trying to cut.

And again, every major economist says yes, we did need to do the two stimulus, etc, and they worked - so calling that a "failure" is pretty unsupported.