When Big Deficits Became Good

[Geee]

National Review:

As a senator and presidential candidate, Barack Obama said that he detested budget deficits. In 2006, when the aggregate national debt was almost $8 trillion less than it is today, he blasted George W. Bush’s chronic borrowing and refused to vote for upping the debt ceiling: “Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’”

In 2008, Obama further blasted Bush’s continued Keynesian borrowing: “The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children . . . so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman, and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.”

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Strong words. But so worried was Obama about the debt that just two weeks after he took office, he promised still more: “And that’s why today I’m pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office. I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay.”