In his dogged determination to blame George W. Bush for everything, Obama persists with the narrative that he inherited the huge deficit. He’s a victim, you see, a mere bystander next to yet another train wreck from the Bushies. Well, not exactly.

As Robert Robb makes clear, Bush didn’t come close to the spending bonanza Obama is proposing: “Even with Bush’s tax cuts, federal revenues in 2007 were at the average as a percentage of GDP, 18.5 percent, going back to 1960. The deficit was just 1.2 percent of GDP, historically on the low side. Accumulated federal debt was 36 percent of GDP.” Obama is in a whole other league:

Obama proposes that the federal government spend over 25 percent of GDP in 2011, compared to a historical average of around 20.5 percent. He justifies this as necessary to continue to fight the recession.Obama, however, projects that the recession will be fully over in 2011 and robust growth under way. Yet he proposes that federal spending continue to be nearly 24 percent of GDP through 2020. In other words, rather than wind down the additional recession spending after recovery, Obama is proposing that it simply become a new, higher base. . .

If Obama were to recommend a path to return spending to its historical share of economic output, in 2020 the deficit would be just $255 billion, about what the federal government spends each year on large capital projects, and just 1 percent of GDP. In other words, not a problem. And federal spending would have still increased by more than 4 percent a year since 2008.

Instead, Obama recommends a 2020 deficit of over $1 trillion and a troubling 4.2 percent of GDP.

It is certainly unseemly to blame others when you not only occupy the Oval Office but enjoy large congressional majorities. Obama senses this, of course, and hence his frequent “the buck stops here” rhetoric. But he soon reverts to form, unwilling to acknowledge that he, not Bush, is now responsible for setting us on an untenable fiscal trajectory. As is his habit, he is banking on no one fact checking him and on the compliant media to simply go along with the Bush-bashing narrative. A year ago that would have been a good bet. Now? Not so much.