Analysis of Obama's Recent Comments

Barak Obama made two recent comments about the economy and the budget at his most recent press conference that are worthy of analysis.

On the economy, the new president referred to the economic expansion of 2002-2007 as "fleeting prosperity," which he attributed to President George W. Bush's policies (i.e. his tax cuts), as if to minimize their effectiveness. First of all, at least in his left-handed compliment, Obama acknowledged the prosperity of the earlier part of this decade at all. Democrats and other liberals have preferred to point to the economic downturn Bush inherited or the mild and brief recession caused by the September 11 attacks as characteristic of the economy of the 2000s. As I note in a previous post, they often tend to ignore the economic record entirely and focus on the fiscal record, pointing to the budget deficits as some kind of an economic barometer.

On those deficits, Obama sought to discredit Congressional Republicans on the subject of fiscal responsibility for having voted for them during the Bush Administration, as if they have no moral standing to criticize Obama's deficit spending. Again, two points are necessary in order to contrast the Bush deficits with those proposed by Obama: 1) the economic growth sparked by Bush's tax cuts allowed the budget deficits to remain proportionate to the size of the economy, and 2) the U.S. had suffered a damaging attack, both in terms of life and the economy, and gone to war to prevent any further such attacks, a situation for which economists and policymakers nearly universally accept budget deficits as fiscally necessary. Obama, however, proposes deficits that would increase in proportion to the size of the economy, extending well past the time even he predicts the economy will have recovered from the current recession, even though he also proposes to reduce military spending.

But the reason I mention Obama's characterization of Congressional Republicans as fiscally irresponsible is that although many Republicans did support wasteful domestic spending during the Bush Administration, there were also many principled conservative ones who did not. Therefore, neither these conservative Republican members of Congress, nor conservative principles themselves, were discredited by the deficit spending during the Bush Administration. Nonetheless, the spending of the Bush would seem to pale in comparison to that already approved and proposed by Obama, which gives conservatives all the moral standing necessary to criticize Obama.