So, you're saying that the Bureau of Public Debt at the Treasury Department is wrong and you're right?
According to them, the national debt now stands at $15.566 trillion versus $10.626 trillion on President Bush's last day in office...and Obama's federal budget that he sent to Congress last month predicts the debt to be hitting $16.3 trillion in 2012.
Not quite.
But this is one of the games the conservatives play. If you want to track the debt that Obama is actually responsible for, you'd pick October 1st, 2009, as your start date, because that's the start date of the fiscal year.
From January 20, 2009 until October 1st of the same year. it was the Bush adminstration's budget that governed. And since we lost 700,000 jobs every month for six of those nine months, the growth in debt during that period is reflective of the Bush era budget and policies.
So, the start by which you can begin yelling about Obama's policies is $11.776 trillion, not the $10.6 trillion figure that you've been fed.
We should also note, that the President ended the game of listing the cost of Mr Bush's war in Iraq "off the books", as had been done for six year, so that added to the defecit number (but not the real debt, since we had borrowed that money already, but just pretended we didn't).
Yes, facts do matter. And, as they did with Death Panels., Swift Boats, and a host of other things, the conservative noise machine makes up its own fake and misleading claims when the real facts don't fit.
