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"Former" Governor Tim Pawlenty (who abandoned Minnesota some time ago to concentrate on his 2012 campaign for President) has recently been attacking President Obama for the current federal deficit and debt. On CNN last Sunday, Pawlenty said, "This nation has got a debt load and a deficit load that is unsustainable."
That's a valid observation, Tim, albeit in bad English. However, where have you been for the past eight years? During all that time, when a Republican President and a predominantly Republican Congress were running then-record budget deficits and adding a whopping $ 5 trillion to the national debt, Tim's grave concerns were nowhere to be heard. During all his meetings and appearances with President Bush, not once do I recall a single word of deficit criticism from the (former) Governor's mouth.
Facts, which are considered irrelevant by Republican politicians of the Karl Rove era, are still, in the words of President John Adams, "Stubborn things." The fiscal facts are that President Bill Clinton left office in January 2001 with the federal budget running a surplus and projected to continue annual surpluses for the following decade. When I arrived in the Senate that month, we discussed how completely the national debt should be paid down with those surpluses. (Then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan counseled to leave $ 1 Trillion remaining, so as not to disrupt the bond markets.)
In his first months in office, President Bush proposed to demolish those future surpluses with the largest upper-income tax cut in history, and the Republican-led House and Senate happily complied. Even after the disaster of 9/11, the commencement of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the return of federal deficit spending, President Bush and the Republican Congress proceeded in 2003 with another enormous tax cut, which also heavily favored the rich. They enacted what the non-partisan organization, The Concord Coalition, headed by former Republican Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson, called "the most reckless fiscal policy" in our nation's history.
That recklessness, however, did not provoke a murmur of protest from Tim Pawlenty.
The current federal fiscal year began on October 1, 2008. At that time and for the next four months, George Bush was still President. Congress had already passed, at his urgent insistence, an emergency financial rescue package, totaling $700 billion. In October, the non-partisan Office of Management and Budget projected that the federal deficit for this fiscal year would be $482 billion. And on January 20, 2009, the day President Barack Obama took office, the national debt stood at $ 10.6 trillion, $4.9 trillion higher than it was eight years ago.
The former Governor is correct that continuing federal deficits at the level President Obama inherited and their cumulative additions to the national debt would be unsustainable. However, the blame for this serious predicament belongs to his Republican friends in Washington. They shared Tim's penchant for favoring the rich with unfair and unsustainable tax cuts, which he has protected, to the detriment of Minnesota, as foolishly as they have, to the detriment of the country. What a disaster it would be, if they ever got together in Washington.
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