I don't believe it

I just said I don't believe it. Why should I find facts to backup your beliefs?

What cost more the failed stimulus program or the Iraq war? I was for neither.

First Richard posts the infamous "Pelosi/Moveon Four Pinocchios Debt Graph", showing that all the debt belonged to Bush. Then he double-dog-dares someone to prove it wrong.

Then it's proven the obvious fraud that it is, but Richard goes on to blame all Obama's debt (that his graph says doesn't exist) on Bush anyway.

But this chart, originally created by the office of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, is as phony as a three-dollar bill. Our friends at PolitiFact did a pretty thorough takedown of it in May, giving it their worst rating: "pants on fire." They even caught the Pelosi people in a bad mathematical error, based on the fact that the Democrats calculated the numbers as if Obama took office a year later than he did.
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If the chart were recast to show how much the debt went up as a percentage of GDP, it would look pretty bad for Obama after not even three years in office. In fact, Obama does almost twice as poorly as Reagan - and four times worse than George W. Bush.
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If MoveOn.org or Pelosi's office had any sense of shame, they would have quietly removed the links to this chart from their websites when PolitiFact gave it a "pants on fire" rating four months ago. The fact that an outdated version is still floating around - and that people are still deluded into thinking it to be correct - is doubly shameful.

Four Pinocchios

The chart actually comes from a Flickr page belonging to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who posted it on May 5, 2011. Specifically, the chart tracks "percent increase in public debt" for the five presidents during the following time periods -- January 1981 to January 1989 (Reagan), January 1989 to January 1993 (George H.W. Bush), January 1993 to January 2001 (Clinton), January 2001 to January 2009 (George W. Bush), and January 2009 to April 2011 (Obama).

We checked with Pelosi's office to see what data they used to assemble the chart. They referred us to the U.S. Treasury's "Debt to the Penny Calculator."

First, we should note that we interpreted the caption in Pelosi's chart that reads "percent increase in public debt" to mean public debt, not gross federal debt. Public debt is debt held by the public, whereas gross federal debt includes both publicly held debt and debt held by the government, such as money in the Social Security trust fund.

Despite what the chart's label suggested, the data we received from Pelosi's office made clear that they had been using the gross federal debt number. So we'll start with that figure.

We can quickly dispense with the figures for Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The "Debt to the Penny" calculator doesn't go back further than 1993, but we were able to estimate the figures for debt under Reagan and the elder Bush by using data from the Office of Management and Budget. OMB's numbers are calculated somewhat differently than Treasury's, but the percentage increases were close enough to what the chart said that we're not going to quibble over them. OMB has debt under Reagan increasing by 186 percent (the chart had said 189 percent) and by 54 percent under George H.W. Bush (compared to the 55 percent in the chart).

Instead, we'll focus on the numbers for Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama.

From the online calculator, we requested the daily debt totals since 1993 and picked out the ones closest to the inauguration dates of those three presidents, as well as the end of the month of April 2011. Here's what we came with for gross federal debt:

January 20, 1993 (end of George H.W. Bush and beginning of Clinton): $4.188 trillion
January 19, 2001 (end of Clinton and beginning of George W. Bush): $5.728 trillion
January 20, 2009 (end of George W. Bush and beginning of Obama): $10.627 trillion
April 29, 2011 (closing date of the chart): $14.288 trillion

This allows us to determine how much the debt rose under each president:

Under Clinton: Increase of $1.54 trillion, or 37 percent
Under George W. Bush: Increase of $4.899 trillion, or 86 percent
Under Obama: Increase of $3.661 trillion, or 34 percent

So we can dispense with Clinton -- in the chart, his figure is correct. But the chart is significantly off for both Bush and Obama. We found Bush to have an 86 percent increase, not 115 percent as the chart said. And we found the debt under Obama to be up by 34 percent, more than double the 16 percent cited in the chart.

We quickly discovered the source of the discrepancy: Whoever put the chart together used the date for Jan. 20, 2010 -- which is exactly one year to the day after Obama was sworn in -- rather than his actual inauguration date. We know this because Treasury says the debt for Jan. 20, 2010, was $12.327 trillion, which is the exact number cited on the supporting document that Pelosi's office gave us.

However this error happened, it effectively took one year of rapidly escalating debt out of Obama's column and put it into Bush's, significantly skewing the numbers.

Using the corrected figures does mean that, superficially at least, Democrats have a point. The debt did still increase more, on a percentage basis, under Bush than it did under Obama.

Richard, how about the biggest omission...

you're comparing 2 years of Obama to 8 years of Bush (or Reagan)

Interpreting the graph

The U.S. budget situation has deteriorated significantly since 2001, when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecast average annual surpluses of approximately $850 billion from 2009-2012. The average deficit forecast in each of those years is now approximately $1,215 billion. The NY Times analyzed this roughly $2 trillion "swing," separating the causes into four major categories along with their share:

Recessions or the business cycle (37%);
Policies enacted by President Bush (33%);
Policies enacted by President Bush and supported or extended by President Obama (20%); and
New policies from President Obama (10%).

CBO data is based only on current law, so policy proposals that have yet to be made law are not included in their analysis. The article concluded that President Obama's decisions accounted for only a "sliver" of the deterioration, but that he "...does not have a realistic plan for reducing the deficit..."[1] Recessions have long-lasting impacts on forecasts, as they reduce the GDP estimates for future years and increase the amount of safety net spending, like unemployment and food stamps.

This graph shows that $9.2 Trillion of the $12 Trillion supply-sider increase in national debt is considered problematic by economists. They say it is fine to increase the debt in step with national income. Republicans say the whole $12 Trillion is a problem.

The green line shows what would have happened if Reagan and the Bushes had just kept the debt growing at the same rate as the economy. That would make their parts flat. Many conservatives claim Congress increased Reagan's budgets, but this is not the case as you can see documented here.

WWII caused the debt to shoot up, starting in 1942, and reach 30% higher relative to the country's wealth than it is today. The economic stimulus of that government spending pulled us out of the great depression and into high gear to win the war. (When to save / when to borrow.)

The green line in the graph shows what would have happened if Reagan had proposed budgets that let the debt increase in step with inflation and the economy-if he had kept it at a constant fraction of GDP. That's not much to ask of a president who said he'd do far better than those before him, since every previous post-war president had actually reduced the debt as a fraction of GDP.

By the end of the Reagan-Bush 12-year "revolution," the extra debt they had piled on the country was costing the country an extra 2.6% of GDP in interest-$300 million a day. Without that interest working against him, Clinton would have paid down the debt a bit faster. That helps the green-line goes down in the Clinton years. That's what would have happened without the Reagan-Bush interest burden.
Now if W. Bush had held the line as all non-supply side presidents had done, the national debt would have been only 21% of GDP, and the country would have been ready to pull itself out of the Great Recession with ease. In fact when W. Bush's last budget year ended we would have had $9 Trillion less in debt.

So how did Reagan, the great debt-slasher, go so far wrong? Partly it was his belief in supply-side "economics." This "theory" claims that when the government cuts taxes, especially taxes on corporations and the rich, it makes them so happy to keep more of their money that they work much harder, get richer, and pay even more taxes than before the tax cut. So the lower the tax rate, the more money the government collects to pay down the debt! Believe that happy talk, and you can run up quite debt.

Of course the rich loved this "theory" and fed the press many stories about the wonders of the new supply-side "economics" (cooked up by Laffer, as a graduate student). Money talks, and a lot of people listened.

It's time to rethink what radical conservatives have done and are doing to our country. The Reagan-Bushes National Debt now totals $9.2 trillion. That's the lions share of our present debt.