To the surprise of absolutely no one, the nation’s debt has skyrocketed during President Barack Obama’s tenure. In a little over five and a half years, the Obama administration has added more than $7 trillion to the total, a number that represents more debt accumulation than the administrations of George Washington through Bill Clinton combined. At the close of business on July 31, the nation’s debt was $17.6 trillion, with $7.06 trillion of it accumulated since Obama was inaugurated in 2009. CNS News offers some gut-wrenching perspective regarding the numbers: As of June, there were 115,097,000 households in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The $17,687,136,723,410.59 in debt the federal government had accumulated as of the end of July equaled $153,671.57 per household. The $7,060,259,674,497.51 in new debt that the federal government has taken on during Obama’s presidency equals $61,341.82 per household. The median household income in the United States in 2012 (the latest year estimated) was $51,017. Thus, President Obama has increased the federal debt by more than the typical household’s annual income. There is bitter irony and hypocrisy attached to these numbers. “The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents –number 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back– $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic,” said presidential candidate Barack Obama, at a 2008 campaign event in Fargo, ND. Bush was indeed nearly as irresponsible as Obama, adding $5.849 trillion in eight years to the national IOU, an increase of 101 percent over the $5.8 trillion in debt America owed at the end of Clinton’s last budget in FY 2001. Yet it is worth noting two salient facts: the largest accumulation of debt on Bush’s watch occurred after Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress in 2006; and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) Bush signed into law in 2008, accounting for a large part of his administration’s debt accumulation, was supported by a majority of Democrats in both the House and Senate, while a majority of Republicans opposed the measure. Furthermore, Democrats have had majority control of the government, including total control for the first two years of the Obama administration, for the last eight years.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 12:10:52 +0000
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