Would That It Were So, Mr. President

President Obama likes to say that the deficits were caused by Bush 43 starting two wars and paying for them with a "credit card issued by the Bank of China."

When I walked in the Oval Office, I had more than a trillion dollar deficit greeting me, and we know where it came from. Two wars that were paid for on a credit card. Two tax cuts that were not paid for, and a whole bunch of programs that were not paid for. And then a massive economic crisis.

That was the way he put it during the debate with Romney. But he's repeated it a number of times.

Leave aside for the moment that the 2008 budget had a deficit of a little over $400 billion and that the trillion dollar deficit he is talking about was in 2009 (it eventually came in at about $1.4 trillion). And leave aside the fact that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka the Stimulus) added about a trillion dollars to the 2009 budget deficit, but it was passed on February 13, 2009, "at the urging of President Obama." For those of us who are temporally challenged, Obama was President on February 13, 2009, Bush had been out of office for a little less than a month, and the Democrats had control of both the House and the Senate (holding a filibuster proof majority in the Senate).

Leave aside for the moment the fact that the federal deficit was more than $1.2 trillion for each of 2010, 2011 and 2012. Those were the budgets where Obama had promised to cut the deficit in half. Oh, excuse me. I forgot: The Senate, under Harry Reid, refused to pass ANY budget, much less Obama's.

Obama is also fond of providing big plans for future spending with the money we are going to save from not being at war any more.

I'll use the money we're no longer spending on war to pay down our debt and put more people back to work - rebuilding roads and bridges, schools and runways. After two wars that have cost us thousands of lives and over a trillion dollars, it's time to do some nation-building right here at home."

That was what he said in accepting his party's nomination in September, 2012.

Leave aside whether that will actually put more people than government employees, (whose current unemployment rate is about half that of the rest of the nation) back to work. If government stimuli really worked, why do we still have such high unemployment?

No, what I really want to talk about here is this: Have you ever thought about what happens when you stop using your credit card to go places and to buy new stuff (like you do when you fight a war)? Do you suddenly have extra cash to spend on other new stuff?

God knows, I don't. Too bad, huh?