The short answer: everyone.

As for the long answer, well, let's warm up, first.

In an open letter posted today on Politico.com, Sen. John Thune urged President Obama to adopt significant deficit reduction strategies: reduce discretionary spending, veto excessive spending bills and end the controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Advertisement

It's interesting stuff, especially in light of Obama's recent call to freeze discretionary spending at current levels. (That's still a mild cut, since Obama doesn't adjust for inflation, but it's less than what Thune is calling for, a return to the FY2008 baseline.)

But I wanted to address one claim Thune made in his letter that is technically true but doesn't tell the whole story:

"Republicans are not without blame and did an inadequate job of restraining spending when they held the White House and Congress: Budgets increased too quickly and money flowed too freely. But the last budget of the previous administration ran a deficit of just over $400 billion, a fraction of today’s deficits."

As I said, that bolded part is true. The last budget president George W. Bush proposed, the FY2009 budget, called for (PDF) a $407 billion deficit.

But that's the budget Bush proposed on Feb. 4, 2008. The 2009 fiscal year began on Oct. 1, 2008 — a month before Obama was elected and four months before he took office.

By the time the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30, 2009, the $407 billion deficit Bush proposed had ballooned to $1.4 trillion.

This gets back to the headline of this post. How much of that is Bush's fault and how much is Obama's?

Well, to start with, Bush owns around $480 billion, including the $407 billion deficit he proposed plus the cost of a bipartisan economic stimulus plan passed under the Bush administration but after his budget proposal.

According to the Bloomberg article cited above, $420 billion of deficit was due to falling revenues due to the recession.

The bailouts under the TARP program — proposed by the Bush administration and initially supported by both Obama and Thune — added $245 billion. Thune and most Republicans opposed the second half of the TARP program, and it's unclear how much of that fell into FY2009 and how much went later. For the sake of argument, let's split it down the middle — Bush and Obama both "own" $122 billion of deficit there.

The spending increases and tax cuts in Obama's stimulus plan added around $200 billion in 2009 deficit according to the same article.

An "omnibus" spending bill passed under the Obama administration in February raised spending on domestic programs by about 8 percent, adding $20 billion to the deficit above Bush's request.

Looking back: we've got a $1.4 trillion deficit. Of that, $420 billion is taken away — it was caused by falling revenues apart from spending.

So the remaining $9.8 trillion in total deficit includes $480 billion in initial proposals and a 2008 stimulus bill supported by Bush, and $122 billion for half of the TARP bill that we're assigning to Bush. That's $600 billion of the FY2009 that's Bush's fault. (That's not to say that Obama didn't support parts or all of it. But ultimately, the buck stops with the president.)

Obama owns $200 billion from the stimulus, $122 billion from his share of TARP and $20 billion from the omnibus bill, for around $350 billion.

That obviously doesn't quite add up; I'm not seeing sources to account for the remaining money $30 billion or so. I'm assuming a fair bit of it might be supplemental military spending and other things, but I don't know. For the sake of argument, we'll round it away, but you can assign it to Obama if you want.

So if you set changing revenue levels aside and focus only on spending, Bush-era policies amounted to about $600 billion in deficits for FY2009; Obama added $350 billion to that. That's about a 60 percent increase, but that falls short of the three-fold deficit jump it looks like if you just look at the raw numbers.

The FY2010 numbers, of course, are entirely Obama's fault, and that's a level about equal to the enormous FY2009 deficit. So this isn't attempting at all to absolve Obama from blame for running a massive deficit. He's guilty as all get out on that count. Where the attacks from Sen. Thune and others don't quite add up is attempting to blame Obama entirely for tripling the deficit. He increased the deficit by 60 percent and then perpetuated those policies.

Daniel Mitchell, a blogger at the libertarian Cato Institute (hardly a left-wing group), made the same point here.

Mitchell also included a handy visual representation of the problem.

This, per Mitchell, is what the popular conception of the deficit is:



 Going by fiscal years, the picture looks a bit differently:



And here's a quick-and-dirty alteration of that graph to show the blame-apportionment I've just done:



Bush deficit is in green, Obama in maroon and revenue drops in blue.

Sen. Thune's statement was accurate, and it DID come on the tail of a paragraph talking about how Republicans share part of the blame for gigantic deficits. But his description of Bush's last budget as being $400 billion compared to "today's deficits" doesn't tell the whole story.