When it comes to the debt ceiling debate, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has found a familiar scapegoat — President Bush — as he blamed the former president for saddling the U.S. with half the national debt in an interview with GOP Congressman Steve Scalise of New York.

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Scalise: President Obama came in saying we’ve got to just keep ramping up the spending in Washington and look where that’s got us. It’s gotten us with 9.2% unemployment and now this $1.5 trillion deficit this year. We’ve got to turn this around.

Matthews: You know this bed was on fire when he got in it. Let’s be honest about it.

Scalise: And both sides have blame Chris.

Matthews: Your guy Bush didn’t veto a single spending bill. And by the way Bush got a big tax cut, two big wars, a big tax cut, a prescription drugs bill that wasn’t funded. We had a guy on last night that showed that almost half the federal debt was caused by Bush over the eight years that he was in the office. That’s serious business.

Scalise: President Obama loves blaming President Bush.

Matthews: No, I just did it. I just did it.

The only problem is that Matthews’ guest the previous night, Bruce Bartlett, a disgruntled former Bush administration official, embellished the numbers to make a stronger case that the debt was largely Bush’s fault.

Bartlett said that when Bush came into office the debt was $6 trillion (actual $5.7)  and that when he left office it had grown to $12 trillion (actual $10.6) which is a large number but not exactly the doubling of the debt that Bartlett claimed.

Matthews made it worse, though, by saying that we have a $14 trillion debt and that Bush was responsible for half of it.

First of all, even using Bartlett’s faulty numbers he was talking about six trillion, not seven.

And based on the real numbers from the Treasury Department the debt increased by $4.9 trillion, which is 34% of the current $14.3 trillion debt we currently owe. That may still be a big number but it isn’t half the debt.

Also in just a little over two and a half years the debt has grown 25% under Obama, which is much faster than the 18% it grew under Bush at the same point in time in his presidency. Last week on the floor of the Senate, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) described it this way: “The total amount of money spent since the President took office is $8.5 trillion dollars. By the end of his first three years in office we will have added $5 trillion to our gross federal debt.”

But the facts don’t matter to Chris when he’s trying to make a point.

It looks like it’s time to send Matthews back to school for some remedial math training.

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About the author

Don Irvine
Don Irvine is Chairman of Accuracy in Media. He is active on Facebook and Twitter. You can follow him @donirvine to read his latest thoughts.

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3 Comments for Matthews’ Bad Math: “Half the Debt Came from Bush”

Ted

The national debt was approximately $5 trillion dollars on clinton’s last day in office … and approximately $2.5 trillion of that amount is attributable to the deficits run by the Reagan administration. Bush 43 came into office with an approximate $500 billion budget surplus left by Clinton … but Bush 43 and the 2001-2001 GOP congress quickly spent that and … eight years later … had added another $6+ trillion to the nation debt … and … in the process … their economic policies led to the net loss of more than 8 million jobs … resulting in The Great Bush Recession (and its after=effects).

By all accounts, it will cost up to $2 trillion more to extricate ourselves from Iraq and Afghanistan … and another $2 trillion to be paid out over time in health care benefits for the Iraq-Afghanistan vets, plus their other statutory military benefits.

So … it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that the Bush 43 administration and his 2001 to 2007 GOP congress PUT US INTO THIS FISCAL AND ECONOMIC MESS!

George W. Bush IS MOST CERTAINLY THE CAUSE of the fiscal and economic hell the working middle class of this country now finds itself totally immersed in!

Similar to the DISASTER OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION that Herbert Hoover’s policies caused … it will take years-and-years-and-years before The Great Bush Recession will be ameliorated.

Anyone blaming Obama or the Democrats is just a no-mind blowhard.

Braeden

Is anything solved by trying to place blame on Bush or Obama? I see no way that the US gets through this mess by simply saying…”WTF yo Bush did it I seen him do it, Obama is the man USA!”

This interview went from a ‘What’s going on down there’ type of question to a ‘Well Bush did this’ argument. I don’t care if this budget deficit was caused Thomas Jefferson . . . shouldn’t it be fixed?

I was always told the American way of life was to work hard, earn a high enough wage to support your family, and enjoy whatever you make over that. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is just spending out of control with no real thoughts to end the higher spending every year. I can’t fathom how a ‘Balance Budget’ approach (you know where when you want to spend a dollar you make a dollar) is seen as unreachable.

SteveJ

“Bruce Bartlett, a disgruntled former Bush administration official”

Bruce Bartlett is NOT a “former disgruntled Bush administration official.”

He is a former senior economic adviser to Ronald Reagan.

And like a number of former Ronald Reagan advisers in BOTH foreign policy and domestic matters, he was shunned by Bush sycophants to the detriment of the Republican Party.

Bush was a failure because he was NOT a Conservative. The sooner the Republican Party understands this, the sooner Republicans will return to winning elections by healthy margins on a consistent basis.