Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) headlined an event on Friday for the North Dakota Republican Party, and lambasted President Obama for what she saw as his historically terrible handling of the nation’s finances. The only problem, however, was that her pronouncements didn’t bear much resemblance to reality.
Bachmann argued that “there is no moral equivalency” between the admitted over-spending of the Bush administration compared to the Obama presidency. “Because if you look at the debt level accumulated under George W. Bush, 400 some-odd billion dollars, President Obama in his first year in office accumulated $1.4 trillion, over four times more than that big spending George Bush — and that was after 911 and the recessions and all that he had to deal with and the two wars. Over four times,” said Bachmann.
“As a matter of fact, President Obama spent so much money that if you took all the debt that we accumulated from George Washington, every president up until Barack Obama, President Obama accumulated more debt in eight months than all previous presidents combined. Combined. That gives you context for the times we’re living in.”
Simply put, none of this is true or even bears much of a resemblance to the facts. When watching this speech, I knew it could not be true, so I checked with Concord Coalition policy director Joshua Gordon.
“The first part, the $400 billion, I can only surmise she is comparing the final year of the Bush administration with the first year of the Obama administration, just the single year deficit, not the debt,” said said Gordon, looking for an explanation.
The problem with that hypothesis was that Bachmann referred to Bush having to deal with 9/11, recessions and two wars, and compared this to just the first year of Obama’s administration. This seemed to mean that Bachmann was referring to the sum total of the Bush years, and alleging that Bush only built up $400 billion in debt during his whole administration. “Then that’s wrong,” Gordon replied.
So what were the actual numbers? And did Obama really build up more debt than all previous presidents combined? “The debt numbers that we normally use are debt held by the public, so that doesn’t count the Social Security trust fund,” said Gordon. “So if you look at the end of the year, end of calendar year 2000, which is pretty close to the beginning of the Bush term, the debt held by the public was $3.4 trillion. And then by the end of the year 2008, the debt was $5.8 trillion. And then by the end of the year 2009, it was $7.5 trillion. Now that’s calendar year 2009, so that pretty much encompasses the first year of the Obama administration.”
So the levels of publicly-held debt increased by $2.4 trillion during the Bush years, six times as much as Bachmann alleged. During the Obama Administration, which has included a lot of spending on the stimulus, bailouts, and two foreign wars, and less revenue coming from a bad economy, the number has so far gone up by $1.7 trillion — obviously less than all previous presidents combined.
In other topics, Bachmann thoroughly rejected the idea of a social guarantee of health care, saying that the rights guaranteed in America’s founding ideals affirm “your right to own property, not necessarily the right or a guarantee to a specific item, to a specific service, like health care, or a to a specific piece of land. Rather, the underlying principle and the ideal is that if we choose, when we choose, we can choose to strive for as little or as much as we want, and once we acquire that property, nobody can take it away from us. That’s a radical idea, that what I provide belongs to me, not to the king, but it belongs to me. ”
Bachmann also attacked the Obama administration’s latest budget and it’s trillion-plus deficit: “Our government is intentionally choosing failure, they’re choosing failure and they’re handing you the budget. How do you like them apples, and how are you going to pay for it? You have to give up up more of your private property, your pursuit of happiness, to pay for their failure. That’s what they’re doing to us.”
An overriding theme was that the Obama administration is taking away the freedom of the American people, and reducing them to a subject population. “And the president also wants to raise your taxes to about 40 percent this year. When your taxes are raised to 40 percent, that means government is laying claim to owning 40 percent of you, of what you earn,” said Bachmann. “Think of it that way, because that isn’t just it, the federal income tax, you need to add to that Social Security tax, Medicare tax, state tax, county tax, city tax, township tax, school tax, metro authority tax, sales tax, gas tax. Pretty soon Uncle Sam owns more of you than you do. Is that America? And that’s government depriving you of your God-given right to the pursuit of happiness. That’s not what the Founders thought, they thought that should you should work for you, and you should work for your family, they weren’t about to condemn you to a life of indentured servitude. That’s not the great hope that they had for you, because they thought you were free. They respect you, they saw you as free people. And they knew that you could figure out your own future, you didn’t need to have them for that.”
