I am interested in principles. not partisanship. Bush was not a real conservative. Earlier in his administration, he pushed through “compassionate” policies such as Medicare Part D and other social welfare programs. However, what you seem to not understand is that in our country, Congress has Power of the Purse. The president does not determine the budget or how our money is to be spent. Congress controls government spending. And for the last 2 years of Bush’d presidency, who controlled Congress? The Democrats.
The Democrat Congress is to blame for these failed economic policies- hence the name tax and spend liberals. The massvie deficits result from Democrat spending and floundering money away on bureaucracy and social welfare, as well as issuing sub-prime mortgages and loans to destitute, largely African American ACORN-Radical-linked Democrat Party activists, who had no way of paying these loans back. Yes, it is people like you who are to blame for the depression we are in.
Instead of realizing that government spending and fiscal outlandishness and high taxes are to blame for our economic woes, Obama sticks to his liberal guns and insists that the free market is bad for the economy, when common sense and economic erudition suggest that it is Keynesian, neo-Marxist polciies that are to blame for our woes. The bailout of the banks and the subsequent stimulus were passed by the Democrat Congress. We lost control of Congress in 2006 to the Democrats, which is when all of our economic problems began as a country. Deficit spending has increased beyond all reasonable bounds under the DEMOCRAT Congress led by Pelosi and Reid.
Budgets do not come from the White House, they come from Congress, and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democratic Party. They controlled the budget process for fiscal year 2008 and FY 2009, as well as FY 2010 and FY 2011. In that first year, they had to contend with Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases.
For FY 2009, though, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bypassed Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the FY 2009 budgets.
And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as president to complete FY 2009.
If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the FY 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, Democrats in Congress took control of spending, and that includes Obama, who voted for the budgets. If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it from himself.
In a nutshell, what Obama is saying is, “I inherited a deficit that I voted for and then I voted to expand that deficit fourfold since Jan. 20, 2009.”
After the stimulus bill did little, if anything, for the economy and increased the deficit substantially, why is he blaming the previous administration for the sluggish economy?
And unfortunately, idealogues and drones like you, charlie hall, do not realize the fundamentals of our system of checks and balances- that it is the Congress that controls spending, not the president.
This is Civics 101, and if you fail to realize the truths in my vort here, than you failed Civics 101.
The only authority the president has over Congress is veto power. A veto can only be overriden by a 2/3 vote of Congress. The president simply does not and cannot control government spending. That has been in the hands of the Democrats since 2006, and the proof is in the pudding. 4 years of Democrat Congressional rule have given us a depression and failing economy, with a deficit that reached over $ 1 Trillion not too long ago. Did we have a depression and failing economy prior to 2006? I don’t think so. The economy under a Republican Congress did great, from 1994-2006, more or less. When people say that Clinton was good for the economy, what they are really saying is that the economy did well under Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress, which is 100% emes. Under Bush, despite two wars (which plenty of Democrats had voted for) and terrorist attacks, we all did a lot better than we are doing now. Under Bush, excluding the effect of home equity extraction, our economy grew at a rate of 1% during the Bush years.