Like most right wingers and Republicans out there, Fox regular Charles Krauthammer really hopes that most Americans have collective amnesia and can't remember anything that happened before the day that President Obama took office and just what kind of a mess he had to contend with coming in.
During a discussion on this Wednesday's Special Report with Bret Baier, host Baier asked his panel members, Krauthammer, Charles Lane and Steve Hayes about President Obama's statement this week that he's cut the deficit by two-thirds, despite the right wing's constant efforts to portray him as a "tax and spend liberal." Initially Krauthammer was unprepared to go after President Obama, but after his cohorts Hayes and Lane weighed in, Krauthammer came back with this lame attack.
From Fox's blog: Krauthammer Sounds Off on Obama Saying He Cut Federal Budget Deficit:
Charles Krauthammer weighed in on "Special Report" tonight about President Barack Obama's recent comments regarding the federal budget deficit. [...]
Krauthammer said that what Obama did with the deficit is "completely unprecedented."
"A trillion and a half dollars, we've never come near to that," Krauthammer stated. "He did it in four years...the biggest run up in the deficit in history. And of course it was reduced, because it was entirely unsustainable. So that's really an empty boast."
Krauthammer added that the level that Obama is at now is "historically high in pre-Obama days."
"He talks about it as if he's eliminated the deficit," Krauthammer remarked.
No, that's not what he did. If anyone's rhetoric is "empty" it's Krauthammer's.
As we've discussed here many times before, The Washington Post did a fine job of laying out just who was responsible for the budget deficit back in 2012, and just what President Obama had to contend with when he first took office.
Krauthammer of course is going to either completely ignore or dismiss reports like this one: Adding to the deficit: Bush vs. Obama (click to enlarge image.)
Or this article from The New York Times from back in 2011: How the Deficit Got This Big:
The second graph shows that under Mr. Bush, tax cuts and war spending were the biggest policy drivers of the swing from projected surpluses to deficits from 2002 to 2009. Budget estimates that didn’t foresee the recessions in 2001 and in 2008 and 2009 also contributed to deficits. Mr. Obama’s policies, taken out to 2017, add to deficits, but not by nearly as much.A few lessons can be drawn from the numbers. First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect. If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels. Second, a healthy budget requires a healthy economy; recessions wreak havoc by reducing tax revenue. Government has to spur demand and create jobs in a deep downturn, even though doing so worsens the deficit in the short run. Third, spending cuts alone will not close the gap. The chronic revenue shortfalls from serial tax cuts are simply too deep to fill with spending cuts alone. Taxes have to go up.
Here's the graph they mentioned.
Most liberals would argue that President Obama has actually cut the debt too quickly and that there's been real economic damage from this sequester and from balancing the budget on the backs of working Americans, but in Fox-land, it doesn't matter at all that President Obama done what they would have been canonizing one of their own for. It's meaningless if he didn't take us from Bush practically putting us into a depression to record high surpluses.
You can also count on all this talk about balancing budgets to to straight out the window the next time we're unfortunate enough to have another Republican in the White House again. Just like under Bush, they won't matter any more if that happens.