Half Truths

Regardless of what political agenda is being pushed I hate to see people speak or perpetuate half truths. I try very hard not to do that myself. Today I would like to tell the story of two half truths.

The second half truth is the declaration by President Obama that he intends to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. His declaration is coupled with him reminding us of a half truth that President Bush put forward throughout his presidency – namely the fact that his military expenditures were largely left out of the regular budgeting process – relying instead on supplemental appropriations to cover the large gaps in funding the massive military missions. This declaration is made as an attempt to hide the fact that he is proposing record deficits for his entire term and there is nothing to suggest that he will ever propose anything approaching a balanced budget even if he serves two full terms.

In response to Obama’s half-truth many Republicans are perpetuating the first half-truth by sharing the following graph (or some similar variation):

If we were to admit the full truth the graph would look more like this graph (which I created based on the best information I could find online without excessive research):

Looking at the complete picture we see that the Bush fiscal record is 1) incomplete and 2) abused the budgetary process to obscure the financial cost of our military engagements. We also see another myth being put forward, that the extraordinary 2009 budget is attributed to Obama. The truth is that Obama took office 7 months into FY2009 and  the bulk of that budget was spent by the Bush administration. On the other side, we see that Obama inflated the FY2009 budget by including the appropriations that Bush would have acquired through supplemental appropriations and by frontloading some of his new priorities so that he could claim to cut the deficit in half while running deficits that are larger than anything seen during the Bush administration.

I am convinced that any good goal has as much chance of succeeding while acknowledging the full truth than it has when only presenting half the truth.  am also convinced that while both parties have been outrageously fiscally irresponsible the democratic party is even more bold about pretending that we can put that fiscal responsibility on the shoulders of generations unborn.