Obama and the Democrats (pronounced Debtocrats) would have you believe that they inherited huge deficits from George W. Bush and the Republicans.
The facts say otherwise.
When Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, he did inherit a fiscal problem…..from the Democratic-controlled Congress, not George W. Bush.
The Democrats did not assume fiscal and budgetary control in January 2009. It was actually January 3, 2007, the day the Democrats took over both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the start of the 110th Congress. The Democratic Party controlled a majority in both chambers for the first time since the end of the 103rd Congress in 1995.
On January 3, 2007:
The Dow Jones closed at 12,621.77
The GDP for the previous quarter was 3.5%
The unemployment rate was 4.6%
On January 3, 2007, Barney Frank took over the House Financial Services Committee and Chris Dodd took over the Senate Banking Committee. Fifteen months later the economic meltdown occurred in banking and financial services.
Budgetary control does not reside at the White House. It resides in the Congress, and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democratic Party. They controlled the budget process for FY 2008 and FY 2009, as well as FY 2010 and FY 2011.
Flexing their budgetary muscle, in FY 2009 Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid passed continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the FY 2009 budgets.
And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete FY 2009.
If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the FY 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, Democrats in Congress took control of spending, and that includes Barack Obama, who voted for the budgets. If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it from himself.
In short, what Obama inherited a deficit that he voted for and since then has presided over an administration that has increased that deficit four-fold since January 2009.
