Budget Watchdog Blames Debt Crisis on Bush Policy

The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has updated research that projects nearly half of public debt in 2019 will be attributable to President George W. Bush’s tax cuts plus the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The tax cuts left the American treasury particularly vulnerable when the financial crisis hit, the CBPP reports: “The events and policies that pushed deficits to these high levels in the near term were, for the most part, not of President Obama’s making. If not for the Bush tax cuts, the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression (including the cost of policymakers’ actions to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term.” — KDG

Talking Points Memo:

By the end of the decade, CBPP projects that, on the current trajectory, the Bush tax cuts, exacerbated by the economic downturn, combined with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for the significant majority of public debt as a share of GDP.

Without those factors, and without the need for stimulus measures under President Obama, CBPP projects that the debt-to-GDP ratio would have dropped under both Presidents Bush and Obama.

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