Posted by Sir Four at 10:30pm Jun 3 '13Obama 2009-2013 is significantly worse than every one of Bush's years, even 2008 when the crisis started to bite, too.
That's sort of true, in the sense that Obama was the president for the majority of 2009. But even the most ardent Republican partisan has a difficult task in claiming that 2009's deficit has anything to do with Obama. In the US, the federal budget for the next fiscal year begins on October 1st of the previous year, so Fiscal Year 2009 began October 1st, 2008 under Bush. The whole housing bubble and eventual financial crisis occurred entirely during the Bush administration; while Obama entered office just as the worst of its aftermath was hitting. And there was no way to turn that around quickly. So, I think 2009 belongs in Bush's column.
In the interest of fairness, it bears mention that Obama and his team did underestimate the scale of the crisis early on. Prior to Obama being sworn in, one of his advisors infamously claimed that unemployment would not top 8%. This was based on projections that underestimated the severity of the recession. Liberal commentators such as Paul Krugman would later suggest that such faulty projections led Obama to pursue a stimulus that was not properly calibrated to the needs of the economy. Of course, Krugman's prescriptions would've resulted in even higher short-term deficits.
Re: Big government - Sir Four