OBVIOUSLY NOT MATH MAJORS: Liberals Claim Obama Has Reduced National Deficit By 50%

This is the kind of crap I have to deal with on my timeline as the typical "progressive" struggles to understand arithmetic.

@NatureGuy101 @directorblue Federal gov has shrunk under obama. You are thinking of Bush.

— Paula (@Paula68154) October 9, 2014

L.D. Jackson, writing at Political Realities, speaks truth to idiocy.

...Time would escape me to write about all the nonsensical lies coming out of liberal land, but this one is really priceless. Thanks to Cry and Howl for pointing me to this piece from a blog that is clearly trying to sell a lie to the American people. It makes the claim that President Obama has reduced the national deficit by 50%. Let me explain why that is nothing but a load of hogwash. The title of the post is “NATIONAL DEFICIT DROPS 50% UNDER OBAMA ADMINISTRATION!”. I’ll come back to why that is interesting in a moment.

American Liberal Times – The Obama Administration has cut the national debt in half but the Republicans and assorted Right-Wing types are still screaming and catter-wallering about this administration’s “Run Away” spending.

I’ll spare you the rest of the post, as it is nothing more than a bashing of conservatives and the “previous administration”. for the spend-happy ways. In reality, that’s what the post is really about, not the national deficit or the national debt. He used it as a launching pad to bash President Bush and the Republicans. He should have named the post “Any Excuse To Bash Bush Will Do”. At any rate, the author of the post is evidently unaware that the national deficit and the national debt are not the same thing. Let’s look at the facts, shall we?

The national deficit is how much money our government spends over and above what it takes into the treasury. As you can see in the chart below, it’s quite a sum of money.

Just for the record and in case the chart is too hard to read, the national deficit was just over $400 billion in 2008. In 2009, it was right at $1.4 trillion. This was due, in large part, to the massive stimulus spending undertaken by President Obama and his liberal friends in Congress. It has declined since that time, but it is still well above the levels we saw during the Bush administration. To make the claim that Obama has reduced the national deficit by 50% is ludicrous and I will not allow it to go unchallenged.

...His administration is spending more money than they are taking in, thus driving the national deficit up by billions of dollars. As a result, the national debt was at $16.7 trillion in October. It was $10.6 trillion when he took office in 2009. That’s an increase of 57%. As much as President Obama would like us to ignore these numbers, they tell the tale of a President who has spent more money than any previous holder of that office.

I'm so confused by these Obama Democrats: on the one hand, they refuse to cut a single cent from any entitlement program or to begin to repair the out-of-control Social Security and Medicare entitlements. On the other hand, they claim that Obama has somehow "cut" federal spending.

Such preposterous statements would be worthy of an SNL skit... if SNL wasn't on NBC... and if the situation wasn't so catastrophically dire for the next generation.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.