An irony of modern presidential campaigns is that they bring on board top tier economic advisors, but that doesn’t stop them from injecting economic nonsense into candidate speeches.
Candidate Obama just added some skilled economists, but that didn’t prevent him from making ridiculous claims about recent economic policies in a speech yesterday. Take one Obama statement: “our president sacrificed investments in health care, and education, and energy and infrastructure on the altar of tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs.” Obama is wrong on every point in this remark.
Here are the facts from the federal budget looking at Bush’s first 7 years in office (FY2001 to FY2008):