The Obama Recession, Con't

Obama's 100 days are up and he hasn't fixed the economy yet. Time to punish him.

The new Democratic administration has made it necessary for the federal government to borrow just under one half of every dollar it must spend this year to fund its existing obligations and all the new spending the new president and his allies in Congress approved during Obama's first 100 days in office.

As the Associated Press explains, the FY2008 deficit will increase "by $89 billion to above $1.8 trillion—about four times the record set just last year." Which Orszag and others want us to believe is somebody else's fault.

The Reagan deficits, which used to be held up as an example of the former president's mismanagement of the economy, were, at their worst point, only about a tenth of what Obama has given us in his first year—no, his first days—in office. Today Reagan's $221,245,000 billion budget deficit for FY 1986 ( U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, annual), once the worst year on record, looks like the good old days. And that deficit occurred during a period of economic expansion, unlike the Obama deficit, which is being incurred during a serious recession.

The deficit is not the only weakness in the Obama policy. Unemployment, which is now just under 9 percent, continues to rise. And increased joblessness leads to increased government spending for things like additional unemployment benefits and food stamps. At the same time the much promised transparency in stimulus spending has yet to appear. As the AP is reporting, "Federal auditors acknowledge they can't yet track the transportation money that is leaving Washington and there is no single list of the thousands of projects planned in each state."

The days of blaming Bush are at an end. At some point Obama's White House is going to have to step up and accept responsibility for the fact that its economic program, for the moment at least, is failing, that it is not producing the promised results and that it is, as the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office suggested early on might be the case, making things worse.

This guy must have hated Bush adding $5 trillion to the national debt over 8 years then and leaving Obama with such a huge problem. It wasn't Obama who signed TARP into law, you know. How quickly people forget Bush did that on the way out the door and stuck Obama with the bill.

Look, economically Obama has a crapload of problems, and I disagree with what he's doing with the banks. But the fact remains if John McCain was President, he'd be bailing out the banks, only we'd have a spending freeze and no stimulus whatsoever. I'll take Obama's approach to McCain's worst of all options neo-Hooverism.