National Debt has Exploded Under Bubble-Boy

The Associated Press has a story out reporting that the national debt of the United States is increasing by nearly a million dollars per minute or 1.4 billion dollars a day. When George W. Bush took office, the national debt stood at 5.7 trillion dollars. Now, after nearly seven years of his administration, six of which his party controlled both houses of Congress, the national debt stands at 9.13 trillion and is set to go over 10 trillion dollars by the time he leaves office.

The article points out that the consequences of this increase in the national debt:
But the interest payments keep compounding, and could in time squeeze out most other government spending — leading to sharply higher taxes or a cut in basic services like Social Security and other government benefit programs. Or all of the above. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will have added to our nation's debt problem to the tune of about 2.4 trillion dollars over the next decade, according to the article.

What the article doesn't stress is that Bush's reckless, radical tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 greatly contributed to this problem. Between 1993 and 2000, the years of the Clinton administration, the deficit between what the government spent and what it took in as revenue decreased. This followed the 1993 tax act of Clinton's which Republicans claimed would ruin the country's economic. In 2000, the goverment actually ran a surplus of 86.4 billion dollars.

Now, it is true that in 2001 that surplus had turned into a 32.4 billion dollars because the economy had entered a mild recession. But that relatively small deficit exploded after Bush's tax cuts went into effect. Here are the numbers for the annual defict,in billions of dollars, according to the Congressional Budget Office:

2001-32.4
2002-317.4
2003-538.4
2004-568
2005-493.6
2006-434.5

As can be seen, Bush's tax cuts of both 2001 and 2003 were followed by massive increases in the deficit. Although Bush and his Republican allies tout the recent decline in the deficit as "proof" of the effectiveness of his tax cuts, 2006's deficit of 434.5 billion dollars is higher than any annual deficit under Reagan, his father, or Clinton. Boy, that Harvard MBA that his supporter bragged about in 2000 has really helped our nation.