90% of Obama’s problems are Bush’s—he says

On 60 minutes Obama surprised even his supporters by only accepting 10% of the blame for the economy. Washington Post Fact Checker goes through this morass rather carefully and gives him four Pinocchios (the maximum), the little dummy with the long nose that grew with lies. The very long article concludes with some sadness that it is time for him to start accepting some responsibility for the mess—and the consequences of the healthcare law will be killers.

Clearly, a huge part of the deficit problem — about half — stems from the recession and forecasting errors. But Obama’s policies represent a big chunk as well. (We would welcome suggestions for fine-tuning these numbers.)

Now one could argue, as Obama’s defenders do, that his policies to combat the recession were intended to be temporary. But he has also supported permanently extending the Bush tax cuts for Americans making less than $250,000, which by itself will shrink federal revenues for years to come. That means these are no longer Bush’s tax cuts, but Obama’s.

Moreover, an important part of Obama’s legacy — the health-care law — has not even taken full effect yet. The CBO calculated virtually no impact on the deficit in the first 10 years after enactment, but all bets are off after that.

Finally, Obama claims that “we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower.” We regret to say that the president is repeating a widely debunked column that appeared on MarketWatch earlier this year. We devoted three columns to the column’s faulty logic, and FactCheck.org and the Associated Press also said it was bunk. (PolitiFact said it was “half true.”)

Not to get too deep in the weeds again, but the claim is based on treating 2009 (as we said, an amalgam of Bush and Obama policies) as actually Bush’s year, and then ignoring Obama’s proposed spending increases in the future. Such calculations help to dramatically shrink the growth of spending under Obama relative to other presidents.