More mail from Peter Roskam yesterday. This time a piece designed to scare me about the national debt.  On the back, next to Roskam’s signature, it tells me “This mailing was prepared, published and mailed at taxpayer expense. This is a service to the the citizens of the Sixth Congressional District of Illinois.” Right next to the pretty glossy photo of rich white people walking in a park, probably in Wheaton.

So how is this a service? A service to the residents of the sixth might be a mailer that told the victims of the Bush financial collapse how to get job re-training and unemployment benefits, and food stamps, and suicide counseling. No, this is a political message, designed to help Roskam’s party defeat the efforts of President Obama to make things better for ordinary Americans.  Pretty ironic when you think about it – Roskam’s spending our tax dollars to print and mail this political message railing about the national debt and excessive spending. What an ass. Based on their polling, Roskam and his Republican colleagues believe that debt and budget deficits are one area where President Obama is potentially vulnerable and so they’re wasting our money on propaganda like this.

Roskam says that “we’re at near historic debt levels, the likes of which have not been seen since WWII: the national debt is over $11 trillion dollars and growing rapidly.” Well, that’s true enough.  But where did all that debt come from? The New York Times’  David Leonhardt did a great job analyzing the growth of budget deficitsback in June: America’s Sea of Red Ink Was Years in the Making.

It all began when George Bush took office in 2001. As the last Democratic president left office, he handed President Bush a booming economy and a budget surplus projected at $800 billion annually through 2012. Under Bush, the nation plunged into recession in 2001 and the country was forced to increase spending on economic relief while tax revenues decreased. Meanwhile Bush started two expensive wars, one of them inargueably elective, and spent billions on a Medicare prescription drug benefit that was largely a gift to insurance and pharmaceutical companies. So as spending soared and tax revenues decreased, what does Bush do: why give huge tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, further decreasing revenues and increasing the deficit.

Bush’s economic policies resulted in his second recession, the present one, that began in 2007. Again tax revenues plummeted and safety net spending increased.  And then then the mortgage and banking crisis, a product of Bush’s anything goes anti-regulatory policies. Bush is forced to bailout the banks, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac to prevent a global economic collapse, further increasing the deficit. Bush leaves office and hands President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit, two wars with no end in sight, and an economy in ruins.

Leonhardt breaks down responsibility for the deficit like this:

You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economists’ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years.

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

So about 10 percent of the present deficit is attributable to President Obama’s policies: 7 percent to economic stimulus to pull the nation out of the economic crisis he inherited from an incompetent Repupublican administration and 3 percent related to his new domestic programs. 3 percent!

If Peter Roskam were serious about reducing the deficit he would:

• Stop wasting tax dollars on political mailings and telephone campaigns
• Start working to repeal the irresponsible Bush tax cuts
• Start working to disengage the country from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that he has supported and to reduce military spending to reasonable levels
• Get behind the President’s efforts to fix the healthcare system
• Stop working for more tax breaks to the wealthy like an end to the estate tax

But then we all know that Roskam is not serious about reducing the deficit. His only interest is in using it to make things more difficult for the President in hopes of boosting his party’s political fortune.

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