Is It All "Bush's Fault"?

Hardly.

Hennessey is extremely displeased with Orszag's dissembling. Here's a taste:

Director Orszag is correct that neither the Medicare drug benefit nor the tax cuts were offset with other spending cuts or tax increases. He fails to tell you that in 2003 Congressional Democrats wanted to spend more on Medicare drugs than the bill President Bush signed into law. (President Obama was a State Senator at the time.) He fails to tell you that President Obama did not propose means-testing the drug benefit to save money, as President Bush tried to do. He also fails to tell you that President Obama’s budget proposes to continue $3.2 trillion of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and the AMT patches that followed them. (See the first few lines of Table S-5.) He also fails to tell you that his $9 T figure includes $835 B for the stimulus and associated interest costs that President Obama clearly did not inherit.

Well, yah. But hey!

What about those 640,000 jobs??