Recorded Deficit is nothing compared to what Bush blew

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Everyone is concerned about the deficit. Not the least of which is the Chinese who are the largest foreign holder of US Treasury securities. The worry is, with rising deficits, foreigners will cut back on the purchase of Treasury debt.

The deficit for October alone was $176 billion, $26 billion higher than the $150 billion economists expected. And the deficit for the year ending in September 2009 was $1.42 trillion. That’s right. Trillion. Which was 989 billion more than the record deficit Bush ran up for 2008.

But while the tea party hypocrites and conservatives with their Hitler signs and swastikas protest , and squeal over the deficit, here is something they can remember. When conservative George W. Bush came into office, liberal Democrat Bill Clinton left the country with a $5.5 trillion budget surplus.

That’s right. Surplus. That was a result of Clinton’s budgets and his tax polices. That was enough money to have wiped out the entire 2009 deficit, pay the $2 trillion for Bush’s Iraq war (which Bush and the Republicans refused to pay for), pay the entire cost of the health care reform and still have $1.1 trillion left over. Let the conservatives wave their Hitler signs over that.

Bush’s blowing of the $5.5 trillion surplus in his first three years in office was something that Paul Volker, Chairman of the Fed under Reagan said in an interview he found almost incomprehensible. Reprehensible might also be a word one could use.

So the next time the tea baggers want to protest the deficit and whine and complain about Democrats and spending, they can remind themselves it was one of their own that not only put the country into these deficits, but blew surpluses created by a Democratic president that would have bailed out the country instead of AIG.

No matter what happens, its going to be the Democrats who are going to fix the economy. There are going to be peaks and valleys, mistakes and missteps. And to be sure Obama is no bargain. But after what Bush and the Republicans did to this economy, if they really want to do the country some good, they should really just go home and shut up. They have no credibility and are 100% responsible for the fiscal mess this countryh is in. They have nothing to say of any value. And the blowing of the surplus and the economic mess were caused soley by Republican conservative ideology and incompetence. And you can throw stupidity also into the mix.

Bush and the Republicans willfully and intentionally, based on their ideolology, reversed all of Clinton’s economic policies. And guess what happend? They got the opposite results.

Just another reason, to quote Christopher Hitchens, that no responsible person could ever vote for a Republican for anything.