It's shrinking

By Mustang Bobby

One of the boilerplate lines from the Romney campaign has been that President Obama has "doubled the deficit."

They're right... if by "doubled" they mean the president actually made it smaller:

Late Friday afternoon, the Treasury Department published the official report on the U.S. budget deficit for the most recent fiscal year: $1.089 trillion. While that's obviously still a very large budget shortfall, the deficit is $200 billion smaller than it was last year, and is nearly $300 billion smaller than when President Obama took office.

To add a little historical context to this, over the last four decades, only two presidents have reduced the deficit this much, this quickly: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

This is one of those stories that doesn't get a lot of press — did you hear about it before now? — which makes it easy for Mitt Romney to lie about it and get away with it. But the deficit has historically grown under Republican presidents and shrunk under Democrats.

So when Mitt Romney tells you that "getting our fiscal house in order is more than an economic imperative — it's a moral imperative" and that "Americans deserve a president who will secure a future for our children that doesn't leave them buried in debt," he's telling you to vote for Barack Obama and the Democrats because clearly the Republicans don't know how to do anything about the deficit but make it bigger.

By the way, I'm sure that if the Republicans actually admitted that the deficit had shrunk in the last four years, they'd take credit for it, saying they stopped Obama from his "reckless spending." Yeah, except they haven't passed a budget in two years.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)