The Daily Background

Barack Obama, from his recently-released book The Audacity of Hope, chapter 5, titled Opportunity:

[After Clinton left office] For the first time in almost 30 years, we enjoyed big budget surpluses and a rapidly declining national debt. Ever after the dot-com bubble burst, and the economy was forced to absorb the shock of 9/11, we had the opportunity to make a down-payment on sustained economy growth and broader opportunity for all Americans. But that’s not the path we chose.

Instead, we were told by President Bush, that we could fight two wars, increase our military budget by 74%, spend more on education, initiate a new prescription drug plan for seniors, and initiate successive rounds of massive tax cuts- all at the same time. The result is the most precarious budget situation that we’ve seen in years. We now have an annual budget deficit of almost $300 billion. Not counting billions of dollars each year in emergency Iraq spending, that goes directly to our national debt. That debt now stands at almost 9 trillion dollars: approximately $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.

It’s not the debt alone that’s most troubling. Some debt might have been justified- if we had spent the money investing in those things that make us more competitive. We might have used the surplus to shore up Social Security. Or restructure our healthcare system. Instead, the bulk of the debt is a direct result of the President’s tax cuts. 47.4% of which went to the top five percent of the income bracket. 36.7% of which went to the top 1%. And 15% went to the top 1/10th of 1%. Typically people making 1.6 million dollars a year or more. In other words, we ran up the national credit card so that the biggest beneficiaries of the global economy could keep an even bigger share of the take.

Filed under: Presidential election, Tax Money, Z-TDB Blog