Since the Democrats have precious few accomplishments to brag about (at least very few accomplishments that are popular), they don’t have much choice but to fall back on Bush bashing to save their necks in November. The most popular meme is that Bush and the Republicans caused the current huge deficits through the tax cuts (aka giveaway to the rich) and the Iraq war. Christopher Hayes, of the Nation, writes,

First, the facts. Nearly the entire deficit for this year and those projected into the near and medium terms are the result of three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts, and the recession. The solution to our fiscal situation is: end the wars, allow the tax cuts to expire, and restore robust growth. Our long-term structural deficits will require us to control health-care inflation the way countries with single-payer systems do. [That would, of course, be rationing; sorry, Grandma. — ed.]

This is, in fact, nonsense. While the figure of $3 trillion is often bandied about as the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the CBO, the real total over the last nine years is $709 billion, far less than the cost of the Obama stimulus that didn’t stimulate. The cost of the wars has been a relatively small part of total federal spending.

As for the Bush tax cuts, they were fully implemented by mid-2003. By 2005, budget deficits were declining sharply and continued to do so until 2008, when the recession began to seriously bite. Even the New York Times noticed the surge in tax revenues by 2006 (h/t Instapundit), writing on July 9 that [block quote]

An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year, even though spending has climbed sharply because of the war in Iraq and the cost of hurricane relief.

The wealthy! You know, those guys that Bush had given away all that tax revenue to.

Also declining was unemployment, which had stayed stubbornly high from the end of the 2000-2001 recession. It had reached a recent high in June, 2003, at 6.3 percent just after the tax cuts had come into effect. It immediately began to decline (5.7 percent in December 2003, 5.4 in December 2004, 4.9 in December 2005, 4.4 in December 2006).

So if the Bush tax cuts caused the current deficits, how come the deficits stayed steady or declined (dramatically) for four years after they were implemented?

In an honest world, the idea that the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq war caused the current fiscal mess would be laughed out of existence. But since the mainstream media is evidently willing to carry any amount of water for the Democrats, it won’t be.