(02-13-2020 05:53 PM)mrbig Wrote:  Honest question - Congress passes the budget and the President signs the budget. When assessing whether the projected deficits in the link provided by 69/70/75, what is the best way for a layman like myself to determine how much credit/blame to give to Congress and how much to give to the President? Republicans controlled the House for 6 of Obama's 8 years in office and they obviously did not see eye-to-eye with Obama.
For anyone interested, here is the CBO 2009-2019 projection from when the government was transitioning from W Bush to Obama. Here is the 2020-2030 report that just came out.

The Obama deficits didn't really start to go down until after republicans re-took control of the HOR. Whether that was because they're more fiscally responsible, or because the economy resumed growing, or simply because republicans and Obama couldn't agree on anything (remember the government shutdown?), I don't know.

I note from the CBO 2009 projection that they expected a trillion dollar deficit in 2009, but expected it to drop very quickly back to the $200-300 billion per year range, consistent with the bill of goods we were sold, that the huge 2008-09 deficits were a one-time thing to address the recession.

I also note from the 2020 projection that they are looking at similar deficits in the 2021-2026 time frame as they were projecting in 2017, and that the 2027 deficit projection is actually smaller in the 2020 projection than in the 2017 projection. Perhaps that is the result of greater growth projected in 2020 than in 2017.

As far as president versus congress, again a lot of 2011-2017 was baked into the cake by democrats in 2009-2010. And I will say that democrats managed te illusion very well. By structuring things so that the deficit bottomed out in the2016-2018 time frame, and then started to grow again, they set it up quite nicely to give Obama the credit for educing the deficit, and have whoever followed him take the blame for the inherent subsequent increases.

I remember when the Trump tax cuts were being described as "trillion dollar" cuts. That's ten year number, the one year effect is about $100 billion, which approximates pretty closely the annual differences between the CBO projections and Trump actuals. But here's the thing, by describing the impact of the tax cuts as a "trillion dollars" it is now fairly easy for the left to say, "Look, Obama was decreasing the deficit, but Trump passed a trillion dollar tax cut, and the deficit is back over a trillion dollars as a result." That's false, but the verbal sleight of hand is there, and has been used.