President Obama Piles on Another Trillion Dollars of Debt

COMMENTARY | For the fourth year in a row President Obama will run a $1 trillion budget deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This announcement reflects President Obama's reckless spending along with the current high unemployment rate which will combine to make President Obama's re-election very difficult. This will be the fourth $1 trillion deficit for the Obama administration. He is the first president ever to have a trillion dollar deficit. Before the four years and more than $4 trillion of national debt under President Obama, George Bush had the largest budget deficit in history. George Bush's record breaking 2008 budget deficit was $438 billion, less than half of the amount of all four of President Obama's budget deficits.

The Congressional Budget Office cites the Bush era tax cuts as the reason for President Obama's trillion dollar budget deficit. They fail to mention that President Bush's budget deficit was less than half the amount of any of President Obama's budget deficits under the exact same tax policies. President Bush was also fighting two wars, recovering from the September 11 attacks, and dealing with hurricane Katrina. Circumstances under the Bush presidency were not ideal. His spending deficits were historic. Both congressional and presidential spending were out of control during the Bush presidency, but Bush's spending has nothing on the current levels of fiscal irresponsibility in Washington.

Looking at the Obama presidency it is hard to fathom how spending has increased to these levels. We have nothing to show for the spending other than a stimulus package that cost more than $800 billion dollars. The only thing that President Obama's stimulus package stimulated was America's national debt. To put President Obama's spending into context, his stimulus package cost more money than the biggest budget deficit in world history. That is until President Obama took control of Washington.

The CBO also predicted "modest" economic growth of 2 percent of GDP to go along with steady unemployment of 8.9 percent today. The 8.9 percent unemployment is significant because Christina Romer, the Obama administration's chief economist at the time of the stimulus debate, said that unemployment would not go above 8 percent if the stimulus package passed. She argued that his economic stimulus would put Americans to work immediately and lower unemployment rates to normal levels of around 5 percent unemployment. When asked why unemployment continues to remain historically high, President Obama simply states that, "it could be higher" as seen in the embedded clip.

This latest announcement of another trillion dollar deficit should give the Republican nominee for president a solid footing to debate President Obama on his economy. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush both lost re-election due to poor economies, and President Obama could suffer the same fate.