Does George W. Bush not get enough credit on the budget?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I ran into someone once who seriously claimed that the only reason the budget didn't balance under Bush by the end, was because he bailed out the banks.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

In all seriousness, it does annoy me that Bush was actually bringing down the deficit for most of his second term all for naught due to the Great Recession in his last year.

"Pillars of salt and pillars of sand"


Remember though Iraq was kept off budget and paid for with emergency funding mechanisms. This meant that the budgets were artificially lower than what they actually were.