Karl Rove notes, via Twitter, that as a candidate, Barack Obama criticized Pres. George W. Bush for adding $2.9 trillion to the national debt over eight years. But under the budget released today, President Obama plans on adding $3.2 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2010, 20 months and 11 days into his term. Over the full four years, Obama will expand the national debt by $4.7 trillion.
Another reader, Stephen, remembered Sen. Mitch McConnell’s description of spending a trillion dollars, that it was even more than the equivalent of spending a million dollars a day every day since Jesus Christ walked the earth. He puts the new $3.9 trillion budget into a similar perspective. You would have to start spending the million a day in the year 8675 B.C., in the Pleistocene epoch, when mammoths and saber-tooth tigers walked the earth.