Karl Rove on Deficits

Karl Rove, the White House aide to President Bush, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal predicting that voter anger over government deficit spending is going to hurt the Democrats and help the Republicans. He, of all people, should know; during the Bush administration the government went from a budget surplus of 2.4% of GDP in 2000 to a deficit of 3.2% of GDP in 2008. Granted, there was a war on, and the Democrats controlled Congress for some of this period, and, granted, a deficit of 3.2% of GDP is small compared to the deficit of 12.9% of GDP estimated for 2009. Even so, Mr. Rove's failure to deal with the Bush administration's record on this front, even in a sentence or two, strikes at least this reader as a strange omission. Even another senior Bush administration aide, Keith Hennessey, acknowledged, "In early January CBO estimated a deficit for FY 2009 of 8.3% of GDP. Most of that was because of the TARP. That 8.3% is a genuinely 'inherited' problem that is not President Obama's 'fault.'" The rest of Mr. Hennessey's post went on to blame the Obama administration for overestimating how much of the deficit problem is attributable to the Bush administration, but the key point is right there; attributable to Bush, the country swung from a surplus of 2.4% of GDP to a deficit of 8.3% of GDP. As George Melloan says, "What transpired under a Republican administration, albeit with a Democratic Congress, in the second half of 2008 will discredit Republican claims to be for small government for years to come." And as Daniel Henninger says, "the American voter is absolutely, totally, unremittingly disgusted with both political parties."