What "did" Obama inherit? And from whom?

Democrats have had control of both houses of congress, where spending originates, since the 2006 elections. The spending prior to then was nothing compared to what it is today. Obama inherited his problems from his own damn party! And, he himself was in the senate. How many spending bills did "he" vote against? Zero? Dems say the problems of today were inherited from Bush, and they say this snow is due to global warming. Both are equally believable.

monkeys can fly.

NoDrama said:

monkeys can fly.

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I'm thinking of one monkey that crashed and burned.

he inherited the right to blame all today's problems on yesterday's administration.

Monkeys notwithstanding...

Obama and his toadies not only childishly blame Bush for their troubles, they fabricate the numbers.
Hope and change at its finest!

February 11, 2010
Deception as a Principle of Governance

By James Long


The Democrats all agree that President George Bush received a surplus when he took office after President Clinton's term, and then he passed a deficit to President Obama. Democrats are outrageous prevaricators.


David Axelrod in the Washington Post, 15 January 2010:

Hillary said much the same thing on "Meet the Press," 15 November 2009:

Similarly, Senator Robert Menendez on "This Week," 24 January 2010:

And a 07 February 2010 NYT editorial put it this way:

President Obama in his first State of the Union address also mentioned the large surplus that President Bush inherited in contrast to the deficit that Obama himself inherited.


Every one of the above statements is patently and provably false. The dot-com bubble crashed almost exactly one year before Clinton left office, and the value of the NASDAQ (symbol ^IXIC available on YAHOO!) fell by $2.5 trillion dollars (half its total value) before the end of the Clinton administration. When the dot-com bubble popped, as all economic bubbles do, the NASDAQ fell sharply. Every economic indicator during Clinton's last year in office turned decisively downward -- the surplus, government revenues, and the markets included. Economic projections made at the very top of an economic bubble are foolish, but the dot-com bubble had long since popped, and everything was going south by the time Clinton left office. Consequently, the Democrats' projections of surpluses years into the future at a time when all indices were falling are not just foolish, but dishonest.


A lot of things happened in the economy during Clinton's last year, all of them bad. Besides the dot-com bubble crash in January 2000, the DOW also peaked and started down shortly before Clinton left office, and the S&P started down shortly after that. The NASDAQ continued to fall for an eventual loss of $4 trillion, and the collapse of the DOW and the S&P also resulted in more trillions of dollars lost in the markets.


With the markets crashing, federal revenues were reduced, and GDP growth slowed as President Clinton left office. The vaunted Clinton surplus fell from $236 billion in FY 1999 (ending 30 September 1999) to $128 billion in FY 2000 (ending 30 September 2000), Clinton's last year. Axelrod's and Menendez's claims that the surplus was $236 billion on "[t]he day the Bush administration took over" were off by just sixteen months, during which time markets, government revenues, and the "Clinton surplus" were falling like rocks. At the end of the first FY of President Bush's term (2001), the budget had a deficit of over $157 billion. The "Clinton surplus" fell $393 billion in twenty-four months (FY 1999 to FY 2001) following the dot-com crash, and Clinton was still in office for sixteen of those months.


Empirically, if the American voters in late 2000 believed that the Clinton surplus was as high as the Democrats now claim, and if the long-term projection for the surplus was accepted as valid by those voters, Al Gore would have won the 2000 election in a landslide that would have rivaled President Reagan's victories. In reality, the voters in 2000 were nervous about the economy, having just witnessed trillions of dollars lost in the dot-com fiasco, and Bush won.


Not only did Bush inherit a plunging economy, but given the magnitude of the dot-com crash, this was an extremely perilous time for the American economic outlook. In the event, President Bush applied the proper corrective measures and the damage was minimized, with unemployment limited to a relatively benign 6.1%. The economy went on to register solid jobs, growth, and productivity from 2003 to 2007 until the next Democratic disaster hit: the unaffordable housing bubble.


Sandwiched between the stupid Clinton dot-com bubble and the deliberate Democratic housing bubble, the Bush economy did quite well from 2003 to 2007, with deficits steadily being reduced and government growing at a slower relative rate than the economy. But President Bush had to pay for the considerable costs of Clinton's dot-com bubble (unemployment compensation, job training, lost tax revenues, etc.) until the economy began to recover in 2003, and then, at the end of his term, Bush had to stop the economic collapse that was triggered by the Democrats' mortgage follies. Democrats have hung a bad rap on President Bush because they want to achieve power, and dishonesty is one of the tools they have used successfully (and frequently) in their quest to tell us how to live.


Every economic crisis we have suffered since WWII has been the result of Democratic Party malfeasance or misfeasance. LBJ's wasteful and corrupt War on Poverty did almost nothing to lessen poverty, cost $6.6 trillion over a thirty-year period, and ended when President Clinton signed off on a Republican initiative to end it. In comparison, the total national debt was $5.2 trillion at the point when the fraud-ridden, $6.6-trillion War on Poverty was mercifully ended. President Obama has now substantially reinstituted the War on Poverty with his non-stimulating stimulus package.


President Reagan and President Bush pulled us out of the first two Democratic disasters described above, but Obama's disaster is much worse. Obama is adding fuel to the raging inferno as the economy melts down, rather than taking known corrective actions similar to what Reagan and Bush (and Kennedy, in a similar scenario) did.


If Hillary is really interested in "heading toward eliminating our debt," then she could tell the Democrats to quit spending our money foolishly.


In the Soviet era, Pravda was the major official Soviet newspaper. The term "pravda" is usually translated as "truth," but as Russians use the term, pravda would be more accurately translated as "the official word." The official Democratic word and the official words of all declining mainstream Pravdas is that everything is President Bush's fault, even if the disastrous dot-com bubble and its inevitable crash happened during the Clinton administration.

...
Empirically, if the American voters in late 2000 believed that the Clinton surplus was as high as the Democrats now claim, and if the long-term projection for the surplus was accepted as valid by those voters, Al Gore would have won the 2000 election in a landslide that would have rivaled President Reagan's victories. In reality, the voters in 2000 were nervous about the economy, having just witnessed trillions of dollars lost in the dot-com fiasco, and Bush won.
...

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the author seems to ignore the irregularities of the 2000 election. Florida ring a bell??

this is an excerpt from the Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election Executive Report, put together by US Comission on Civil Rights.

After carefully and fully examining all the evidence, the Commission found a strong basis for concluding that violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) occurred in Florida. The VRA was enacted in 1965 to enforce the 15th Amendment’s proscription against voting discrimination. It is aimed at both subtle and overt state action that has the effect of denying a citizen the right to vote because of his or her race. Although the VRA originally focused on enfranchising African Americans, the law has been amended several times to also include American Indians, Asian Americans, Alaskan Natives, and people of Spanish heritage. Additionally, the VRA includes a provision that recognizes the need for multilingual assistance for non-English speakers.​

The VRA does not require intent to discriminate. Neither does it require proof of a conspiracy. Violations of the VRA can be established by evidence that the action or inaction of responsible officials and other evidence constitute a “totality of the circumstances” that denied citizens their right to vote. For example, if there are differences in voting procedures and voting technologies and the result of those differences is to advantage white voters and disadvantage minority voters, then the laws, the procedures, and the decisions that produced those results, viewed in the context of social and historical factors, can be discriminatory, and a violation of the VRA.​

The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred. Instead, the report concludes that officials ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities. The state’s highest officials responsible for ensuring efficiency, uniformity, and fairness in the election failed to fulfill their responsibilities and were subsequently unwilling to take responsibility.​

Disenfranchised Voters​

Disenfranchised voters are individuals who are entitled to vote, want to vote, or attempt to vote, but who are deprived from either voting or having their votes counted. The most dramatic undercount in the Florida election was the uncast ballots of countless eligible voters who were wrongfully turned away from the polls. Statistical data, reinforced by credible anecdotal evidence, point to the widespread denial of voting rights. It is impossible to determine the extent of the disenfranchisement or to provide an adequate remedy to the persons whose voices were silenced by injustice, ineptitude, and inefficiency. However, careful analysis and some reasonable projections illustrate what happened in Florida.​

The disenfranchisement of Florida’s voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of black voters. The magnitude of the impact can be seen from any of several perspectives:​

• Statewide, based upon county-level statistical estimates, black voters were nearly 10 times more likely than nonblack voters to have their ballots rejected.​
• Estimates indicate that approximately 14.4 percent of Florida’s black voters cast ballots that were rejected. This compares with approximately 1.6 percent of nonblack Florida voters who did not have their presidential votes counted.​
• Statistical analysis shows that the disparity in ballot spoilage rates—i.e., ballots cast but not counted—between black and nonblack voters is not the result of education or literacy differences. This conclusion is supported by Governor Jeb Bush’s Select Task Force on Election Procedures, Standards and Technology, which found that error rates stemming from uneducated, uninformed, or disinterested voters account for less than 1 percent of the problems.​
• Approximately 11 percent of Florida voters were African American; however, African Americans cast about 54 percent of the 180,000 spoiled ballots in Florida during the November 2000 election based on estimates derived from county-level data. These statewide estimates were corroborated by the results in several counties based on actual precinct data.​

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and that's just one of the plenty of irregularities in that election.