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He didn't. He reduced the size of the budget by about 200 billion - it was roughly 1.4 under the last Bush budget in '09 and in 2012 roughly 1.2.
Second, your graph seems to suggest with it's perfectly symmetrical curve that the ideal tax rate is 50%. Not only is there nothing to suppor that, I feel like that would piss a lot of people off.
1. Obama's first budget would have been implemented in fall 2009, and its actual impact couldn't reasonably be expected to be felt until after that. Bush had spent about a trillion dollars before Obama was even inaugurated, let alone had a chance to do anything. So it's not unreasonable at all to give him credit for reducing the 2009 budget by 200 billion. Sure, you can argue that it's not enough, but don't say he increased the deficit, because he didn't - in fact the only President in 30 years who's decreased it more was Bill Clinton.
2. I'm not really comparing Obama to Bush, but Bush did create the structural deficit which is responsible for the sum of America's current debt. That structural deficit is the result of, first and foremost, the 2003 tax cuts that are expiring in 2013, and second, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of those wars is functionally over and the other is supposedly going to be done by 2014, so you'd think with that spending off the books, there would be an opportunity to reduce the deficit further. Combine this with the expiry of the 2003 tax cuts in 2013, and you have another opportunity to reduce the deficit - in this case, by whatever revenue is generated by seeing the top marginal rate go up 3% or whatever it is.
In other words, the deficit should, you'd think, shrink every year over the next four years. However, there will still be a deficit, so the debt will go up. I would guess by another 3 trillion or so over 4 years, but who knows.
3. I know exactly what it's saying in terms of ideal tax rate and what it's saying is obviously correct. I'm just saying it's a dumb graph. It doesn't visually represent the concept it's trying to communicate which is the whole point of a graph.
