Are you a fan of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ deficit chart, but you wish it focused on public debt instead? Well, wish no more. The Washington-based holding tank for superwonks has remade its deficit chart into a debt chart.
The takeaway hasn’t changed. “The Bush-era tax cuts and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — including their associated interest costs — account for almost half of the projected public debt in 2019.” If you’ve been reading this blog, you knew that already. What you might not have known is this: After you add the financial crisis and associated rescue packages to the total, “public debt due to all other factors fell from over 30 percent of GDP in 2001 to 20 percent of GDP in 2019." In other words, cut the financial crisis and the major initiatives from the Bush-era out of the picture, and we’d be in pretty good shape. In fact, we’d be in great shape. “Without the economic downturn and the fiscal policies of the previous Administration, the budget would be roughly in balance over the next decade. That would have put the nation on a much sounder footing to address the demographic challenges and the cost pressures in health care that darken the long-run fiscal outlook.”
And the ever useful deficit chart that he references is this one:
But we are broke because Obama spent a bunch of money and called it a stimulus and wants to give healthcare to poor people, teachers and firefighters are selfish fucks and are laughing all the way to the bank with their outsized compensation all thanks to union thugs, and unemployed people are lazy and lay around on the couch all day while waiting for their next ill gotten welfare check to come in the mail. Oh, and the way to solve all of this utter ruin forced down our throat at the hands of the Socialist Kenyan is more tax cuts for our plutocrat overlords.
I think that about covers it.
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