Mostly OT
The GOP loves to talk about the 10 year deficit now that Obama is in power. So don't you agree that turnabout is fair play?
The 10 year estimates we have now aren't very good data, and are reasonably subject to serious discounting, but they are the best data we have, and if they are off they are reasonably likely to be too low. The 10 year estimates your talking about have been shown to be wrong, so they aren't good data at all. Even from the perspective of the time the Clinton era estimates where not very good data. The military obviously couldn't continue to shrink the way it had, the stock market boom and generally positive economic outlook couldn't last forever.
Of course today's bad times won't last forever either, but the current estimates don't project bad times continuing, in fact they project fairly strong growth. If we don't get that solid growth, and/or if we don't get the actual reduction in Medicare, or all the increases in taxes called for with Obamacare) the actual deficits will be worse.
So by the numbers, it is fair to say that Bush was the worst of the lot
Even by your fantasy numbers Obama was the worse of the lot, since he had the largest deficits (and still does if you change to real dollars instead of nominal).
Having large deficits after some other president has large deficits (if we follow the fairly faulty convention of assigning all or most of the blame for deficit changes to the sitting president) is worse than having large deficits after a more fiscally sound president since deficits compound on each other they don't subtract from each other.
But perhaps more importantly the numbers themselves are bogus.
Clinton never had $5tril in surpluses, and even at the time it was pretty much certain that $5tril in surpluses over the next decades wasn't in the cards. The debt increased under Clinton, not nearly as much as it did under Bush, but still there was an increase, not the $5tril decrease in your numbers. |
