The Bush administration's fiscal record

One of the other takeaways from the Congressional Budget Office's long-term budget outlook is that the Bush administration really wasn't fiscally responsible, while the Obama administration pretty much has been.

The major domestic initiatives of the Bush years -- the tax cuts and the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit -- made the budget picture much, much worse. The Obama administration's health-care reform proposal has, by contrast, made the budget picture much better. (You could say that the stimulus wasn't paid for, but that was sort of the point of the thing. And if we want to put emergency measures into the mix, we also have all costs related to 9/11 and TARP accruing to Bush. And I've been nice and haven't mentioned Iraq so far. Oops.) In fact, there's no high-priced initiative from the Bush years that improved the budget situation, or was even paid for.

This has, I think, had a psychological effect on Washington. One reason people are so skeptical that the government will actually pay for health-care reform -- as it is now statutorily obligated to do -- is because people got used, under the Bush administration, to seeing the government routinely shirk its fiscal duties. And the fact that the same people who voted for all that shirking are now screaming about deficits just makes observers less willing to credit the commitments made by politicians.