As a senator and presidential candidate, Barack Obama said that he detested budget deficits. In 2006, when the aggregate national debt was almost $8 trillion less than today, he blasted George W. Bush's chronic borrowing and refused to vote for upping the debt ceiling: "Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that 'the buck stops here.' "


Two weeks after he took office, he pledged to cut the inherited deficit by half by the end of his first term. "I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay," he said.

In his first term, Obama has added more than $5 trillion to the national debt, borrowing more in four years than Bush did in eight. In fact, Obama is on schedule to add more total debt by the end of his two terms than all prior presidents combined. What happened to worries about leaving our children with a "debt they cannot repay"? And where did all borrowed money go?

The recession that ended in 2009 cut revenues, and the population continues to get older and draw more on federal entitlements. But we have spent record trillions of dollars during the last four years expanding the size of government.



The first possibility is that Obama and his advisers really believed that record deficit spending, near-zero interest rates and expansions in federal entitlements would jump-start the economy into prosperity. In fact, the opposite occurred. Economic growth continued to hover around or below 2 percent of GDP. Unemployment has never dipped below 7.8 percent during Obama's entire presidency. The massive borrowing made things worse, not better.


President Reagan once advocated a "starve the beast" philosophy -- lower taxes resulted in less money for out-of-control government. Obama flipped that sequence to a "gorge the beast" paradigm of an out-of-control government demanding far more in taxes.



Victor Davis Hanson is a syndicated columnist.