weekly response

In this week's terse, joyless address, President Obama reminds the nation that both parties share responsibility for the last decade of unbridled government spending. In the wake of Speaker Boehner's abrupt departure from White House budget negotiations this Friday, the President makes no apparent effort to maintain his hopeful, inspired tone of the last few weeks. This address features not a glimpse of his pearly whites, not even a "have a great weekend!" As such, the summer's foul political stasis persists. The President trudges through an epic struggle of careful political maneuvering and tortured reasoning, compromise futile, for upon his every offer, Republican leaders deftly triangulate to claim a new baseline, desperate to assuage their radical constituents.

I admire President Obama's enduring commitment to civil discourse, and he certainly honors his campaign promise to bring compromise to Washington. But aside from showcasing himself as a reasonable, fair man, this approach has not yielded the necessary results. The proposals Republicans have deigned to consider all rely overwhelmingly on spending cuts, including substantial cuts to Social Security and Medicare, while protecting the corporate rich from paying fair tax rates. The President has invited these proposals by indulging the notion, now common, that both parties deserve equal blame for the current crisis. While the blame game can be dangerous and unproductive, and the President has much to gain from keeping his composure through the entire haul, I am starting to think that progress can only be made once the nation is reminded, with a bit more precision, why the budget deficit is so large.

The fact is, the majority of today's debt accumulated with President Bush at the helm. The extraordinarily costly War on Terror added nearly $800 billion to the bill before President Obama took his oath of office. In addition to increased investment in national security, the growing cost of entitlement programs during the Bush years was not funded by new revenues. Whether or not you feel that these various spending initiatives enacted by President Bush were justified, he and his supporters will proudly point out that taxes remained constant throughout his presidency. Quite obviously, this is the reason why the deficit rose much more quickly than the GDP during the last decade.

If President Obama is bold enough to point out a few of these basic, indisputable facts, his adversaries will surely accuse him of "playing the blame game." But without getting too dirty or personal, it is important for the many interested parties - including politicians, the media, and the public - to hear from the President himself some specific details about the history of our debt. By repeatedly and vaguely asserting that blame must be shared, the President isn't helping people understand what is really going on. But if folks hear him spell out why the budget deficit grew so rapidly over the last decade, even if they refuse to listen at first, they will, perhaps, be more likely to support politicians who espouse responsible, logical economic policy.

Debt math is often confusing and always fuzzy, but check out this graphic, which clearly shows the relative impact of tax cuts on the budget. Also, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman captures the exasperated plight of the left in his latest column, published yesterday in The New York Times.