NYC Letter: Department Of Giant Cojones VII

HAPPY NEW YEAR! +5

Day 715 of CHOPE

We have no regrets. ... Deficit reduction has been a high priority for us. It is our mantra: pay as you go. Unfortunately, that will be changed now. This administration and this Congress inherited a near depression. And so the initiatives that we took were positive for the American people.

Nancy "Speaker No More" Pelosi (D-CA, 8th),
using her last day as Speaker to remind all why
the next day she would no longer be Speaker
WASHINGTON January 4, 2011 (Media Matters)

Nancy Pelsoi, deficit hawk. Who knew? Not us.

SPEAKER PELOSI LEAVES WITH A WHOPPER

January 4, 2011 (FNC) - The numbers tell a different story.

When the Pelosi Democrats took control of Congress on January 4, 2007, the national debt stood at $8,670,596,242,973.04. The last day of the 111th Congress and Pelosi's Speakership on December 22, 2010 the national debt was $13,858,529,371,601.09 - a roughly $5.2 trillion increase in just four years. Furthermore, the year over year federal deficit has roughly quadrupled during Pelosi's four years as speaker, from $342 billion in fiscal year 2007 to an estimated $1.6 trillion at the end of fiscal year 2010.

But the whopper gets bigger still. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

And that doesn’t actually tell the whole story, either. The last budget passed by a Republican Congress spent a total of $2.77 trillion, with a deficit just under $200 billion. Democrats took that in FY2010 — their last actual full-year budget — to over $3.8 trillion, an increase of 38% in just three budget cycles. And when the Democrats finally got around to passing pay-go in their fourth and final year in control of the House, they ended up waiving it in almost every instance afterward.

Media Matters, at the quote source link above, has a fierce, if familiar, rebuttal:

BUSH!

[Long pause. We wait on the crushing polemic. David Brock whirls and whirls on one foot, then abruptly leaves.] How this rebuts or explains spending originating with Democrat Congresses that crafted budgets, continuing resolutions, emergency spending bills, and authorizations increasing the statutory limit on debt for both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama to sign is beyond us.

MANTRA -- BUSH BUSH BUSH
Bush Made Them Spend

Oh, that Mr. Bush and those wily minority Republicans, always outplaying the big dopey Democrat majorities.

¡Ésos son algunos cojones grandes, señora!

CHOPE.

Advances in government transparency -- bigger, more transparent whoppers.