Economic News

This situation is more complicated that this makes it sound.

Take the current situation, Obama is racking up a lot of debt, part of that is because of spending, but mostly because the situation he walked into was a mess.

Similarly, Reagan walked into a mess. If you look at the situation at the end of the Carter administration, bond interest rates were at 20% (!) so interest on the pre-existing debt was *expensive*, oil was in the midst of the shocks, Unemployment was sky high (almost exactly as high as when Obama took the job), and the world was in the middle of the cold war. Sound familiar? It should.

Similarly, when W took the reigns, the economy was in the middle of the dot-com collapse, the housing industry was very very unstable, major pillars of the economy were in freefall, and shortly thereafter, the notion of American invincibility was severely damaged by 9-11, which caused further weakness in the economy and stock market.

Clinton, by contrast had it *easy*, no substantial threats to security came about during his term, there was no substantial "enemy" like the soviet union to deal with, the economy was doing *great* (the dot-com boom and bubble), and social security was building "the trust fund" thanks primarily to the "greenspan fix" in 1983. That last is the primary contributor to the "surpluses".

Another thing to consider is that many times, laws passed during one administration do not take effect until the following administrative term. For example, most of the central provisions of Obamacare (individual mandate and subsidy) take effect in 2014, or 2 years into either Obamas successors term or second term. In the meantime, Deficits are artificially reduced by the taxes that have already gone into effect. So Either Obama 2 or the next president will have increased deficits to deal with having nothing whatever to do with any actions they may undertake.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that the economy sometimes reacts in somewhat unpredictable ways to stimuli. Sometimes, unwise actions can result in *long* booms before the piper comes calling, sometimes seemingly good ideas can precipitate crashes almost immediately.

So simply taking the time at which the debt actually hit the books is rather profoundly unfair.