Spending Like a Drunken Sailor? Not Really.

I recently saw a response to a letter to the editor in the Arizona Republic to a statement that Obama was “spending like a drunken sailor.” The responded said, “I was a drunken sailor, and the difference between me and Obama is that when I ran out of money I stopped spending.” Look at the deficit spending chart (below) comparing the Bush & Obama administration to understand this statement.

The Bush administration deficit is shown in grey on the left; the Obama administration deficit is shown in the red and pink bars in the column to the right. CBO: Congressional Budget Office, this is the “accounting department” for the US Congress. They study bills that are passed and project the costs per year that each bill will generate and the revenue that each bill will generate; they then subtract the total costs from the total revenue to show either a surplus of revenue as in 2000 & 2001, or a deficit as shown in every other year since, and projected for the next nine years. The figures are not released by the CBO until congress has reviewed and approved them, so they were basically authorized by the controlling democrats in both houses of congress. The pink bars are the amounts that the Obama white house admits to. You will notice that their figures are consistently less than CBO figures, but not by much.

Bush and the Republican controlled congress did well in balancing the budget for the first two years, even generating surpluses. On September 9, 2001 terrorists attacked New York, throwing the economy into a devastating downward plunge, due to costs of physical rescue and recovery efforts, business failures, insurance settlements, and other such costs, resulting in a great loss of tax revenue causing 2002 to go into deficit. The following years saw increased spending primarily for the Afghan and Iraqi wars, as well as increased intelligence and security spending. War time deficits are historically normal. The big dip at the end of the Bush administration was avoidable and only happened because the president and president-elect in consultation with congress decided it was necessary to “bail out” AIG.

The Obama administration has committed our future generations to enormous debt by quadrupling deficit spending in his first year in office and into the future. If this were the state of your personal budget, you would be hopelessly bankrupt. This is not spending like a drunken sailor, it is spending like a professional credit card thief; no limit to what he spends, he won’t have to pay it.