Finally, someone in the mainstream media applies sensible analysis to claims about who created the national debt
While I don’t agree with all the details, the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein has taken a decent first crack at the question of who’s responsible for the increase in the national debt these past few years. As I pointed out last August, it’s incumbent on people talking about this issue to do more than simply subtract the national debt today from the national debt the day President Obama took office. To do this analysis properly you need to assign causality for all the spending. So by this logic I would assign all the costs of the Iraq war to George W. Bush, because he started that war while Obama campaigned against it, but I would assign the costs of the Afghan war to Obama during his first term because he supported that war and even expanded it.
It’s time for anyone examining this issue to do the simple math. This isn’t rocket science, but the news media seems to treat it that way. And of course, it’s better to be approximately right than exactly wrong, and the simpleminded assertion about this issue made by politicians attempting to blame the president for anything and everything is exactly wrong.
