Deficit Exceeds $1 Trillion For Fourth Straight Year

The federal budget deficit “for the just-completed 2012 budget year” is around “$1.1 trillion, the fourth straight year of trillion dollar deficits on President Barack Obama’s watch,” notes the Associated Press. In 2011, the deficit was $1.3 trillion. The budget deficit has gotten so big that it is now larger in some months than it used to be in entire years. “The Obama Administration” ran “up the largest” monthly “budget deficit in American history in February of 2010, a whopping total of $220.9 Billion in just one month. February 2010’s unprecedented total is more than most year-long budget deficits in American history, including 2007’s year-long total of $161 Billion.”

In the 2008 campaign, Obama promised a “net spending cut,” but as soon as he was elected, he proposed massive spending increases.

In 2010, The Washington Post described the vast scale of these spending increases: “President Obama‘s policies would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday. . .The 10-year outlook by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is somewhat gloomier than White House projections, which found that Obama’s policies would add $8.5 trillion to the debt by 2020.”

Obama claimed his $800 billion stimulus package was needed to avert “irreversible decline.” But the Congressional Budget Office concluded before and after its passage that the stimulus package will actually cut the size of the economy in the long run, although it argued that the stimulus would boost the economy in the short run. (Some components of the stimulus package backfired and wiped out jobs even in the short run; many other Obama administration bailout and subsidy programs have also harmed the economy.) The director of the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package will actually shrink the economy in the long run, and have “a net negative effect on the growth of GDP over 10 years” in his congressional testimony in November 2011.  Two hundred economists signed a statement publicly opposing the stimulus package, and two economists argued that the stimulus wiped out a 550,000 jobs by diverting money away from more productive uses in the private sector.

Federal spending under the Obama administration has been at historic highs, consuming around 24 percent of the economy, compared to an average of about 20 percent under the Bush administration. Upon taking office, Obama signed massive spending bills that even George Bush had balked at, such as a “$410 billion spending bill that Bush had refused to sign before he left office.”