Republicans get defensive when comparisons are made between President Obama and President Bush. That is understandable. The chart below appeared in yesterday’s New York Times, accompanied by an article entitled “How the Deficit Got This Big” by Teresa Trich. Ezra Klein today points out today that much of what appears on President Obama’s side of the ledger represent temporary expenditures (g., e.the $711 billion of “stimulus spending” and the $425 billion of “stimulus tax cuts”) where as the largest items on President Bush’s side of the ledger (and what at least 2o sitting GOP senators and 100 GOP House members voted for) represent recurring expenditures (e.g., the wars, the Bush tax cuts, the Medicare Part D drug benefit which will go on in perpetuity).
Klein notes, “To relate this specifically to the debt-ceiling debate, we’re not raising the debt ceiling because of the new policies passed in the past two years. We’re raising the debt ceiling because of the accumulated effect of policies passed in recent decades, many of them under Republicans. It’s convenient for whichever side isn’t in power, or wasn’t recently in power, to blame the debt ceiling on the other party. But it isn’t true.”
Sad, especially given the behavior of the GOP during the debt ceiling crisis, but true.
The Local Paper 
where is the Irag/Afghanistan spending since 2008?
Not to mention the illegal war in Libya that has cost American taxpayers over 9 million a day according to politico.