So what you're saying is that it's got nothing to do with Congress or the Treasury or the Fed or any other agency. It all just rests on the shoulders of one person.

If that's true, then I guess you're crediting Obama for whatever "recovery" we've had since we were on the edge of economic meltdown in 2008?

You don't think it's possible that the global economy is larger than just one person?

I am not defending Bush, but for Obama to keep telling people about the "mistakes of the past" is frankly water under the bridge at this point. Who is to blame for the credit crisis we went through (still going through) isn't really the point any more. But there should be a healthy debate over what we do now to get ourselves out of it. And it's not as simple as just saying "whatever Bush did was wrong, we'll just do the opposite".

Chris,

I understand that he was in office for 8 years. But I was excluding both '08 and '09 to benefit both Bush and Obama by excluding some of the effects of the current crisis. I thought that was being fair to both of them.

But how do you come up with a 1000% increase that you keep referencing? Are you using as your starting point the 2000 surplus? Like I said before, you can't just pick two arbitrary years and say look at that big increase. For example, if the beginning period was a large surplus and the ending year was a large deficit, you'd argue a massive increase in the deficit. Assume hypothetically that in an 8 year span, year 1 had a $200 billion surplus and years 2 thru 7 had $100 billion surpluses. Then in year 8 there was a whopping $1 trillion deficit. Would you say that the deficit exploded by 1000%? While it may be true, you're picking two points in time and ignoring what happened in between those two dates.

You can't ignore the years in between. Deficits fluctuate up and down. That's why I disagree with your "1000% increase" argument. That's why I tried to show you either the 1) average deficit over a longer period and 2) the increase in public debt over a similar period.

If Clinton hypothetically had run deficits during most of his term except for the final year, is the next president really inheriting such a great thing? Maybe in 2000 there were some one-time non-recurring revenues or expense cuts that would not last? Perhaps the economic cycle was heading south just as we transition from one president to another?

PS - I would love to see your math for how the public debt went up 1,000%. I must be missing something. I thought going from $3.4 trillion in 2000 to $5.8 trillion in 2008 would be a 70% increase.

So you won't admit that you were wrong about the data I was supposedly mis-reading?

Maybe you should try to ask one of your colleagues about what the percentage increase is from negative 200 to positive 1,200. Hopefully they can explain it to you better than I can.

You tried to say that to go from negative 200 to break even would be a 100% increase. But actually when you go from any number to zero it's actually a 100% decrease, not increase. If the surplus had started at 500 instead of 200, that would obviously be worse but it's still a 100% decrease to zero, no matter what you're starting point is.

And then once you're at break-even (ie zero), you can't calculate a percentage increase from zero to any number. That's why crossing zero on the number line screws up the calculation and makes your 1,000% incorrect.

So what is it that you disagree with? Did Bush not create a $1.2 trillion deficit? Did he not run 8 consecutive multi-hundred billion dollar deficits? Did he not take the largest surplus in history and make it the largest deficit in history?

If someone takes over a business that was $200 in the red and after running that business for 8 years he turned it around and was making $1200 a year, wouldn't we say that he raised profits by 1,000%???