“Never forget the most recent Republican president didn’t veto one single spending bill.”
~Chris Matthews 

The Republican party has put up a debt clock to track how much the country has increased the national deficit since the start of the convention.  Except – Republicans take no ownership for the national deficit; they would like Americans to believe that somehow President Obama has been on a government spending spree.  But – that’s actually a lie.  Republicans want to convince you that they’ll balance the budget by cutting another $4.5 trillion in taxes even though Paul Ryan readily admits the Romney/Ryan plan only balances sometime in the 2030′s.  Essentially – all it does it reduce taxes for the rich and cut services for seniors, the poor and children.

Ezra Klein explains the “parfait chart” in the above video showing the vast majority of the national deficit comes from policies passed under President Bush.

And this is the chart that Ezra is talking about on the video.  He wrote today on this HERE:

If we didn’t have all that? If there’d been no Bush tax cuts, no wars, no financial crisis and everything else had been the same? Debt would be between 20 and 30 percent of GDP today, rather than almost 100 percent.

Now, the response you sometimes get to this graph is yes, that’s true, but Obama should have done more about the debt. But Obama has proposed a multi-trillion dollar deficit reduction plan. Republicans just refused to pass it. And, to be fair, he refused to sign their plan, too. So the question then is less about what led to the debt and more about who has the right plan to get rid of it.

So as Ezra Klein points out … the biggest drivers of the debt are:

#1 – The Bush tax cuts

#2 – The Bush economic crisis

#3 – The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

But despite knowing this and despite a recent CBO report saying that extending the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans would cost almost $1 trillion over the next 10 years … they want to not only extend them but they want to cut taxes even further (source) and (source).

Those are all Republican led and Republican owned.  And as I’ve explained HERE – Bush is mostly responsible for the deficits today:

In fact – as I’ve written HERE - most people do not understand the government’s budget:

In 2011 – the United States government spent:

• $718 Billion on Defense and “security related international activities”
• $731  Billion on Social Security
• $486 Billion on Medicare
• $283 Billion on Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program)
• $230 Billion on Interest on our national debt

The government spent more on those 5 areas of the federal budget alone than it collected in revenues.  Those 5 areas total $2.45 trillion in spending compared to the $2.3 trillion in revenues the government collected in taxes and other income.

And even though Republicans would like to say differently – spending under President Obama has grown at a lower rate than any president in the past 60 years.  That was rated “mostly true” by Politifact.  (source)

And even though taxes are at an all time modern low (the lowest since the 50′s) … Republicans continue to blame it on Obama.  The deficit is a result of a failure of conservatism.  I’ve written about that HERE.

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