http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/05/the-three-best-charts-on-how-clintons-surpluses-became-bush-and-obamas-deficits/
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The Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative: Between 2001 and 2011, about two-thirds (68 percent) of the $12.7 trillion growth in federal debt has been due to new legislation. Forty percent of this legislative growth was the result of tax cuts enacted after January 2001, and 60 percent resulted from spending increases. Technical and economic revisions combined caused about one quarter (27 percent) of the growth, and changes in other means of financing accounted for 6 percent.
E21: Roughly half of the reason the surpluses never materialized is that federal spending was subsequently increased (over half of this total increase was concentrated in the three years of 2009-11). A little over one-quarter disappeared because of subsequent corrections to the 2001 projections. Less than one-quarter was due to tax relief of any kind and only a little more than half of that small fraction is directly attributable to the 2001 and 2003 tax relief packages.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: If not for the Bush tax cuts, the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression (including the cost of policymakers actions to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term. By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. The stimulus law and financial rescues will account for less than 10 percent of the debt at that time.
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