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Yet, Obama's budget stewardship is open to interpretation. The debt now stands at $15.7 trillion, compared to $10.6 trillion on his inauguration day. On a dollar basis, that's the biggest ever jump in the debt. How much the debt has grown can also be measures as a percentage of what he inherited. By that measure, the debt has increased by half during the three-and-a-half year Obama administration. During President Ronald Reagan's eight-year administration, the debt nearly tripled, from about $910 billion to more than $2.6 trillion. Still, much of the increase during Obama's tenure has been a consequence of the recession. In a poor economy, government spending increases automatically because more Americans become eligible for food stamps, unemployment assistance and Medicaid. Also, a poor economy leads to unemployment which cuts into tax revenue. As a result, deficits are inevitable as more money goes out and less comes in. To be sure, Obama pushed through a stimulus package that cost more than $800 billion and he and President George Bush both approved spending of the $700 billion bank bailout in 2008 and 2009. But those costs are not recurrent. "It's important to understand the reason why the debt went up by so much," said Robert Bixby of the budget watchdog group The Concord Coalition. "We certainly do have a very serious long-term debt problem in the country. We have an underlying structural imbalance between what we are promising, mostly in entitlement benefits, and what we're willing to pay for in taxes. But in the short-term there are a lot of factors that are pushing the debt up that aren't related to fiscal policy." Add to the mix Boehner, who has said when Congress is asked to raise the nation's borrowing cap after the election, he will insist on spending cuts to offset the increase. Democratic leaders call it an irresponsible course of action, noting that the gridlock over the debt ceiling last year caused a downgrading of the U.S. government's credit rating. All of this is aimed at unaligned, independent voters. In turning attention to debt, Republicans are tapping a winning issue they deployed in congressional races two years ago. In October of 2010, Republican pollster Wes Anderson said, congressional campaigns shifted "away from jobs and economy to government taking us over the cliff." The emphasis proved to be a success at the ballot box. These days, the economy remains the preeminent issue in voters' minds, but Anderson says middle-of-the-road votes are the targets of the big government message. "The middle is angry about where we are at and they really see two villains on this stage, this play has two antagonists. Both of them are big," said Anderson, who is working on congressional and statewide political campaigns in several states that are presidential battlegrounds. "One is big business, big Wall Street, big insurance, big oil, just big, abusing the middle class, abusing small businesses, abusing the taxpayer. The other is big government
-- big government wildly running up massive deficits and debt which abuse the taxpayer, the middle class and small business." Independent voters, he said, "hold both of those central tenets to be true."
[Associated
Press;
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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