The Bush Economic Miracle -- The Deficit

From the New York Sun:

2004 - $413 billion
2005 - $318 billion
2006 - $248 billion
2007 - $205 billion

The New York Times's Paul Krugman, in December, wrote that President Bush "plunged the budget deep into deficit by cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains even as he took the country into a disastrous war." Senator Clinton went to the Senate floor in February of this year to speak of the "fiscal recklessness" of the Bush administration, which she charged had contributed to "record deficits." In March, Senator Schumer, who is now the chairman of Congress's Joint Economic Committee, spoke of "budget excesses of the past six years" that have brought us "a mounting debt to the rest of the world."

But as the shrinking figures above show, in fact the deficit is shrinking. When you look at it as a percentage of GDP, the decline is even more striking:

2004 - 3.6%
2005 - 2.6%
2006 - 1.9%
2007 - 1.5%

As the mid-session review released yesterday by President Bush's Office of Management and Budget says, the 1.5% of GDP figure is well below the 40-year average of 2.4%. It's also smaller than the deficit was in the first three years of the Clinton administration. The deficit numbers would be even better but for the war, though it is costing only $12 billion a month.

Read it here.

Once again the left is systematically misrepresenting the plain facts regarding important policy issues. It is they, not the President, who deserve to be suffering a "credibility gap."