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Axelrod claims Bush saddled Obama with a big deficit

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It's the war of the op-eds.

On Jan. 10, 2009, former Bush administration adviser Karl Rove wrote in the Washington Post that Democrats “will run up more debt by October than Bush did in eight years. (We checked his claim here.)

David Axelrod, chief adviser to President Barack Obama, fired back on Jan. 15 in Post that Rove had it all wrong and that Bush had been the big spender.

“The day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus — with a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion,” Axelrod wrote. “When the Bush administration left office, it handed President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit — and projected shortfalls of $8 trillion for the next decade.”

His point was that it was Bush, not Obama, who got the country in a financial mess. He said Bush approved big-ticket items during his tenure that included tax cuts, a new prescription drug benefit for the elderly, and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which allowed the government to spend up to $700 billion to shore up troubled assets and bolster various industries.

And now, Axelrod wrote, the Obama administration is stuck with the bill.

We wondered whether Axelrod's numbers were correct.

via PolitiFact | Axelrod claims Bush saddled Obama with a big deficit.

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