National debt tops $21 trillion for first time ever

[BumRushDaShow]

7. That's because Obama put the REAL debt/deficit on the books

that Shrub hid when he was in office. I.e., Obama ensured the figure was more "transparent". Plus the stimulus (ARRA or "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" ) was about 3/4 of a trillion. Plus there was a 2-year extension of the Shrub tax cuts in order to extend unemployment benefits to recover from the recession (and CBO indicated would add $800 billion). Plus Shrub's Medicare Part D (Prescription Drug plan) was not paid for, so that added to it - but was to be mitigated through the ACA (although now the GOP has been tearing the funding for the ACA apart).

And then you had the wars -

How the US public was defrauded by the hidden cost of the Iraq war
Michael Boyle

When the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration estimated that it would cost $50-60bn to overthrow Saddam Hussein and establish a functioning government. This estimate was catastrophically wrong: the war in Iraq has cost $823.2bn between 2003 and 2011. Some estimates suggesting that it may eventually cost as much as $3.7tn when factoring in the long-term costs of caring for the wounded and the families of those killed.

The most striking fact about the cost of the war in Iraq has been the extent to which it has been kept "off the books" of the government's ledgers and hidden from the American people. This was done by design. A fundamental assumption of the Bush administration's approach to the war was that it was only politically sustainable if it was portrayed as near-costless to the American public and to key constituencies in Washington. The dirty little secret of the Iraq war – one that both Bush and the war hawks in the Democratic party knew, but would never admit – was that the American people would only support a war to get rid of Saddam Hussein if they could be assured that they would pay almost nothing for it.

The most obvious way in which the true cost of this war was kept hidden was with the use of supplemental appropriations to fund the occupation. By one estimate, 70% of the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003 and 2008 were funded with supplemental or emergency appropriations approved outside the Pentagon's annual budget. These appropriations allowed the Bush administration to shield the Pentagon's budget from the cuts otherwise needed to finance the war, to keep the Pentagon's pet programs intact and to escape the scrutiny that Congress gives to its normal annual regular appropriations.

With the Iraq war treated as an "off the books" expense, the Pentagon was allowed to keep spending on high-end military equipment and cutting-edge technology. In fiscal terms, it was as if the messy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were never happening.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/11/us-public-defrauded-hidden-cost-iraq-war

So as a result of the hidden military spending, the Budget Control Act of 2011 pretty much put a halt to that. So now you have sequesters and whatnot, although recently Congress has been passing legislation to raise the caps set forth in the BCA.

Of course there has been much discussion about what the "debt ceiling" really means with respect to outlays vs revenues.