The Carroll County Times asks:
Carter raised the debt to a paltry $1 trillion in 1980. Reagan raised it to $3 trillion. George H. Bush raised it to $4 trillion. Clinton raised it to $5.5. trillion. George W. Bush doubled it to $10 trillion, and Obama has raised it to $14 trillion.
Where was the outrage when Bush doubled the national debt during his administration, and whose policies have driven the country toward bankruptcy? (source)
UPDATE: A commenter noted this:
The number of Republican Senators who voted to raise the debt ceiling each time it came up for a vote since 1997:
1997: 55
2002: 31
2003: 50
2004: 50
2006: 51
2007: 26
2008: 34
2008: 33
Barack H. Obama was elected.
2009: 2
2009: 1
2010: 0
Hmm….
By Email
By RSS Feed
The number of Republican Senators who voted to raise the debt ceiling each time it came up for a vote since 1997:
1997: 55
2002: 31
2003: 50
2004: 50
2006: 51
2007: 26
2008: 34
2008: 33
Barack H. Obama was elected.
2009: 2
2009: 1
2010: 0
Well you could try “Worse than Watergate” by John Dean. That certainly expressed some outrage. So did David Stockman and others. But, more to the point, a $4 trillion debt can still be serviced, while (even allowing for inflation) a $14 trillion debt requires interest payments that are close to unserviceable.
Wait ’till the interest rates begin their inevitable climb.
Can you say “drowning”?
In other words according to their #’s/comparison
GW raised debt 4.5 trillon in 8 years which included the most cosly man made disaster and natural disaster and Omama has raised it 4 trillion in 2 1/2 years. Is that correct?
@ Dogs that Bark:
It’s really the % change you have to look at. Also, some of Obama’s jump in debt was due to decisions that were made before he was in office. i.e. he HAD to keep paying for the wars. TARP was W and not obama. etc…
Actually, no.
Ignoring the fact that the President doesn’t authorize payment for anything, with complete control of Congress (and a 60-vote majority, even, in the Senate), the Obama Administration could have done anything the damn well pleased.
They could have defunded the wars entirely through a either the 2010 or 2011 budget, and no one could even have attempted a filibuster (because budgets are the one item that can’t be filibustered). What actually happened is that the dems actively and knowingly decided to continue the wars.
Whatever Congress funds via legislation, it can choose to defund the same way.
Oh, and those things you firmly place on Bush’s lap?
Voted on and passed by Democrat-controlled houses of Congress. Bush, in fact, had little to do with them save to say they were a good idea (and we’ve never claimed he was a particularly smart man) and sign them into law. Every other part was in the full control of the Democrats.
When the GOP was in control they had no problem bumping up the debt ceiling.
2003: 50
2004: 50
2006: 51
One could also make an an argument that after so many years of kicking the can down the road, they finally realized that we’d hit a dead-end and needed to do something about it.
Or maybe they were all just really moved by Obama’s words in 2006… :)
I think the Tea Party movement has altered the calculus for Republicans and, as others note, the scope of the debt has (hopefully) also caused some measure of common sense to prevail. Nevertheless, some of it is probably just politics as usual, which was also the case when then-Sen. Obama and every Democrat senator voted no in 2006.
PS – Although one might quibble with the term “common sense” the Tea Party movement is, at least in part, a result of the Republican’s lack of fiscal restraint (which lack is shown by all those “yes” votes).
This analysis requires that we show the number of democrats who voted for the increase in the same no. of year. The whole issue is fabricated. All parties want to increase government, they just want to control whose party gets to spend the increase.
That certainly is a valid point. I started compiling that from what I assume is Jeffrey Gordon’s source above (http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/1500-The-Republicans-Haven-t-Always-Been-Against-Raising-the-Debt-Ceiling)
But the cite crashed on me. However for three votes during the 2003-2006 timespan, I saw 3, 2, and 1 non-republicans supporting the increase.
The way congress likes to bundle different things together really makes any of this kind of comparison difficult. How do you exclude the congressman that voted yes/no primarily because the bill also included a big helping of funding for his pet project?
Post Hoc Ergo Proper Hoc Alert! YOu know what else happened around the time that BHO was elected?
If you guessed the Tea Party, you win a big cookie.
Could it possibly be that the Tea party scared the tax-and-spend RINOs into seeing it their way? Could it be that possibly BHOs election had little to do with the change?
YOu know, up to about $25,000 on the HELOC for our remodel, I was okay with it, because we were getting value in the home out the improvements, yadda yadda. Somewhere about $25,000, I stopped “voting” for debt increases because the interest payments got big enough that they were offsetting the benefits of the improvments. So we paid the debt down this year instead of doing home improvements. We are almost at $0. Does it show a lack of consistency on my part that i had an arbitrary number in mind where i said “this far and no further” and then started “voting” against the debt going up any higher? Could this also be what happened?
Not that I’m defending republicans – don’t get me wrong. i just have to cal out a logical fallacy when i see one.