And universal healthcare will not prevent the US economy from driving into the ditch either. However, it will ensure that there is something else driven into the ditch to keep the economy company. Healthcare.

Ditto ILC’s comment.

Off-budget legerdemain has been a staple of Washington accounting for years.

The budget numbers are, at best, a fiction. The really big troubles in Obama’s budget lie not in the numbers but in the expansion of entitlements which always cost far more than estimates (not to mention the harm done to a people that go from being citizens of a country to clients of the state). No one has any idea of what the real costs of, say, national healthcare will be ten or twenty years hence.

(Didn’t I hear Barry say that healthcare “reform” was necessary to get our economy moving again? I can’t see that socialized medicine kept the European economies from driving into the ditch.)

Our liabilities were already in the tens of trillions before the banking bombs started going off. Just wait til the boomers hit retirement age and the Social Security Administration starts cashing in those IOUs in the lock box.

Many Obama defenders in the comments are claiming that the numbers above do not include spending on Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush years. They most certainly do. While Bush did fund the wars through emergency supplementals (not the regular budget process), that spending did not simply vanish. It is included in the numbers above. Also, some Obama defenders are claiming the graphic above represents biased Heritage Foundation numbers. While we stand behind the numbers we put out 100%, the numbers, and the graphic itself, above are from the Washington Post.

If you had any other “off-budget spending” in mind, that WaPo would have left out in producing its graphic that is 100% consistent with what I said… Tell us what it is.

http://blog.heritage.org/2009/03/24/bush-deficit-vs-obama-deficit-in-pictures/

I’m tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to “keep people in their homes.” Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I’m willing to help. But if they bought McMansions at three times the price of our paid-off, $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the left-wing Congress-critters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble help them-with their own money.

That’s righteous anger. A smart political party would want to capitalize on that, instead of dismissing it as fringe rabble-rousing.

- Bush’s last budget was FY2008, and his last deficit was in the $400-500B range.
- By custom, Bush’s last budget should have been FY2009. But the Democrats in Congress deliberately made the FY2009 budget late so that it would only be passed this year, with Obama as President. Thus, in something of an historical anomaly, Obama owns FY2009.
- The FY2009 deficit is something like 4x FY2008.
- Thus, Obama didn’t “inherit a $1 trillion deficit” from Bush. He inherited a $400-something B deficit.
- So, the following makes perfect sense:

Obama Builds on Bush’s Domestic Spending Record

…If one remembers that, by “Builds on”, you had meant “Quadruples the Deficit Of”.