Deficit Deja Vu: Obama's Red Ink Matches Total U.S. Spending in 2001

President Barack Obama Tuesday (Feb. 2, 2010) introduced his budget for next fiscal year. To put it into perspective, consider this: The estimated budget deficit—just the deficit—almost matches the entire federal budget when George W. Bush became president in 2001.

A strong case could be made that Bush and Obama represent the most fiscally irresponsible back-to-back presidencies in national history.

* Federal budget when Bush was sworn in as president: $1.86 trillion.

* Deficit estimate under the proposed Obama budget: $1.6 trillion. A souring economy or lawmakers who lard up the Obama spending plan could easily give us a budget deficit that matches total federal spending in 2001.

* Federal budget just proposed by Obama: $3.8 trillion, more than double the federal budget in fiscal 2001.

In fiscal 2009, Bush’s final budget year, the federal government spent $3.52 trillion, including a $108 billion economic stimulus bill passed early in Obama’s administration but still in the final Bush budget year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Tax and budget policy expert Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute has been closely following the Bush and Obama spending plans and policies. On the Cato@Liberty blog he noted that even after taking out the stimulus bill passed under Obama, “the Bush-Rove team ended up spending $916 billion more annually by 2009 than they had originally planned. Note that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost only about one-fifth of that 2009 excess spending amount.

“Then Obama comes into office and turns out to be Bush on steroids with respect to federal spending. Obama is calling for spending $3.83 trillion in 2011, or $1.1 trillion more than the federal budget nine years ago had promised. That’s a 41 percent forecasting error.”

Let us ask: If increased government spending and budget deficits can improve the economy, as so many in the Bush and Obama administrations have insisted, how did the economy ever tank in the first place?

Let us also ask: Is the nation doing twice as well as it did 10 years ago, when federal spending was less than half what our president is now proposing?

If you agree the answer is no, then let us ask this: Why do we keep spending more?

Steve Stanek (sstanek@heartland.org) is a research fellow at The Heartland Institute in Chicago.