Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
The R house didn't force Obama to cut his budgets? Seriously? I mean they did it to fuck with him, but they def did it.
edit: check the requested and final numbers. You are delusional. I mean I love you, but I worry.
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I checked the numbers before my last post. If you look at federal spending in 2009 and 2010 and assume that was what Obama wanted to do, and then look at it the following couple of years and assume that was Republicans reining him, that's a plausible story, but it ignores some key facts. One is that spending soared because of the recession that started late in W.'s administration. The hike in spending was the stimulus, which was never designed to go indefinitely. And Obama then called for austerity (which I thought then and continue to think was a mistake). He was a good neoliberal and internalized the Wall St. view (just as Clinton did before him) that bond markets will punish a President who runs big deficits. Recall that he insisted that his major domestic policy initiative, the ACA, had to be budget neutral.
Also, I am not delusional that W. and Trump presided over massive tax cuts that made the deficits bigger, something Obama did not do.
