The Obama Administration’s Historic Milestone: More Debt Than His Predecessor In Less Than Half The Time

A momentous day. Not exactly a surprising one, but when you blame everything on Bush it has to hurt when your record on debt in four years is worse than his was in eight

The National Debt has now increased more during President Obama’s three years and two months in office than it did during 8 years of the George W. Bush presidency.

The Debt rose $4.899 trillion during the two terms of the Bush presidency. It has now gone up $4.939 trillion since President Obama took office.

The latest posting from the Bureau of Public Debt at the Treasury Department shows the National Debt now stands at $15.566 trillion. It was $10.626 trillion on President Bush’s last day in office, which coincided with President Obama’s first day.

The National Debt also now exceeds 100% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, the total value of goods and services.

Paul Ryan is giving a press conference at present to announce the 2012 version of the Path To Prosperity, which is the House GOP budget. It has significant tax reform (boiling individual taxes down to two rates of 10 and 25 percent while cutting corporate taxes from 35 percent, which in less than two weeks will be the highest rate in the world, to 25 percent), and $5.3 trillion of budget cuts over 10 years.

$5.3 trillion is an awful lot of money. And yet $530 billion in budget cuts this year wouldn’t even cut the current deficit in half. That’s how bad things are.

It doesn’t get any better, either.  Obama has proposed a new budget for FY2013 that will add another $900 billion to the national debt under the most cheery, best-case scenarios imaginable, and likely will exceed the trillion-dollar mark for the fifth time in his presidency.  In the budget projections released with that proposal, Knoller points out that Obama expects to leave office with a national debt of $20 trillion — which will mean that Obama himself would have nearly doubled the debt during his eight years in office, adding $9.34 trillion for an increase of 87%.

That anybody is seriously considering the possibility this man could be re-elected with such a record is laughable. His is a dead political career walking.

At National Review’s Morning Jolt today, Jim Geraghty makes what we think is a good point…

If we’re seeking to persuade Obama voters that it’s okay to vote for someone else this time, perhaps we need to reinforce that notion that he just doesn’t quite understand how things work in the real world — that he understands the theories of job creation, but not the practice. He talks about a future of algae-powered cars while rejecting pipelines.

It ties to a theory I’ve had for a while, that most apolitical voters desperately want to avoid concluding that the first African-American president of the United States is a failure, on par with a second term for Jimmy Carter. As a result, they will give Obama until the very last minute to demonstrate an ability to get the job done, to demonstrate that he can generate tangible improvements in their lives. But, if around October 2012, people don’t see tangible improvements in their lives, well, the bottom may fall out of his numbers. He’ll still have his loyal base, but the vast majority of independents will decide he just can’t get the job done.

My theory is that most independents are actually conservatives who have lost faith in the Republican Party on fiscal and limited-government issues. The country has clearly moved right in the past decade, which is indicated by Mitt Romney going from being the “conservative” candidate in the GOP field in 2008 to the “RINO” this year. But those prodigal children won’t return until the very last minute; they want their votes to be earned.

At the end of the day, however, no fiscal conservative – or even apolitical voter who can look at the budget and realize it’s a disaster for the country – can tolerate the president who’s on pace to push the federal debt to $20 trillion. Obama might be holding a small lead in some polls now, when the GOP doesn’t have a nominee yet, but he certainly won’t hold it for long once voters recognize his record and the opposition has coalesced into one candidate.

Nobody could survive these numbers. Particularly not a president whose answer to high energy costs is algae and whose answer to the economy is Sandra Fluke.

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