Last year, as Obama took office and during the first months of his presidency, the deficit was at 10% of GDP. This year things have changed.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) pegs the deficit for the fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, at about $125 billion below the $1.42 trillion record posted for 2009, CBO said in a release on Thursday.
CBO estimates that in 2010 outlays declined by $67 billion, and revenues increased by $57 billion. The estimated deficit is about $51 billion lower than CBO projected in August because outlays were lower and revenues were higher than previously expected, according to the report.
The deficit represented 8.9 percent of gross domestic product, down from 10 percent in 2009, based on the most recent estimate of GDP. ...The Hill
It went up sharply during the Bush decade, particularly after 2005 and was Mount Everest by the end of the Bush presidency. It's coming down now and is predicted to level off at a little below 4% by2015.
Unemployment figures for the past month show no change at 9.6%. They were expected to rise slightly. But the loss of 95,000 jobs is discouraging, particularly given that this is the last employment report before the November vote. Most of the losses occurred in government jobs -- still a reflection of the end of census work -- but the total was lowered by a significant gain in private sector employment.
Still when one takes into account the underemployed and people who've stopped looking for work, the total has moved up to 17.1%.
___
How do campaigning Democrats respond to these numbers? Aggressively, according to the New York Times. David Plouffe says hit 'em with the truth!
...He said that in the final weeks of the election, Democratic candidates should quickly pivot to the responsibility that Republicans bear for creating the economic crisis.
“The Republicans here in Washington act as if they were bystanders to this whole thing. It was their policies that were a chief contributor to this,” Mr. Plouffe said. He added that before Mr. Obama came into office, “we were losing 700,000 jobs a month under the same economic policies that the Republicans want to bring back.”
