A spokesman for U.S. Rep. Jeb Hensarling gave me a hard time (in a gentle, friendly way) for linking to a biased take from the left in my post about the feud between the Dallas congressman and the president. He sent me a list of a number of conservative commentators who have jumped to Hensarling’s defense.
I only linked to the Daily Show clip because I thought it was funny. Jon Stewart wasn’t delivering an honest, straightforward accounting of the discussion. I left that to Factcheck.org.
But it’s a decent point, so here’s the first link off the list from Hensarling’s office: some guy named Rush Limbaugh.
Since he’d brought it up, I asked the spokesman what he thinks about Factcheck.org and their findings. (They said that Hensarling told “a Texas-sized whopper” and was giving the GOP full credit for budgets from the Clinton Administration–when America was in a sustained economic boom, running surpluses, and before the Bush tax cuts). He called Factcheck.org “good guys,” but said they missed the point.
What Jeb said — and meant — was Democrats, as in Congressional Democrats with the Constitutional power of the purse, created the deficit Obama is now complaining about.If you take a look at the 12 years that Republicans controlled the House, the average deficit was $104 billion. In just 3 years under Democratic control, the average deficit is now almost $1.1 trillion. So it does workout to be “what were annual deficits have become monthly deficits.”
By the way, President Obama was in the Senate at the time, and to the extent that he was there to vote, he supported the spending that led to the deficit he now says he “inherited” so in an odd sort of way he inherited it from himself…
Bush was president for two of the three years of “Democratic control” that Hensarling’s office mentions. It sounds like his take is reliant on the idea that Congress, and Congress alone, deserve the blame or the credit for what’s in the budget.
But that can’t entirely be the case, right? I mean, Bush himself proposed the big tax cuts when we were running surpluses. And it’s Obama who is proposing a $1.55 trillion deficit this year. So the president has something to do with it, right?
