Obama blames financial woes on Bush

By: Josh Gerstein
Politico
February 24, 2009

As President Barack Obama convened a high-level summit Monday pledging to set the country on a more responsible fiscal course, he blamed the government’s financial straits on his predecessor, President George W. Bush, and on gimmicks used to keep hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending off the books.

“This administration has inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit — the largest in our nation’s history, and our investments to rescue the nation’s economy will add to that deficit,” Obama said as he convened a fiscal responsibility summit at the White House on Monday. “We cannot and will not sustain deficits like these without end. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few years, we cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences to the next budget, the next administration or the next generation.”

Obama gave policy wonks pride of place in the East Room as he convened about 130 lawmakers, policy advocates and union and business leaders for a meeting to showcase his commitment to reining in the deficit and getting control of exploding federal entitlement programs.

“The long-term fiscal picture is unsustainable,” a liberal economist, Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told the group. “We are on the path to the very debt explosion we must avoid. ... To address the daunting long-term fiscal problem, everything on both the spending and tax side ... will have to be on the table.”

(More here.)