Comment Re:Recycling Personalities (Score 1) 448
At the same time, you should understand that you can't "inherit" a deficit. The idea is poppycock.
Of course you can. If you inherit an economy in recession, your tax receipts are low, and your spending on entitlements - that spending which people are legally entitled to have - neither of which can be corrected by presidential or congressional fiat. Then you add a couple of wars to that, necessitating paying those troops and for their equipment etc, another substantial expense it will take time to correct even if you start on ending the war on day 1. You have numerous other spending that is politically untouchable, as the various lobbies will end the career of any politician that touches it, so congress won't touch it with a barge pole.
Only a relatively small portion of the budget is called 'discretionary spending' for a reason. And then you have a congress that is majority controlled by a party that wants to cut taxes (on the rich, mainly) at every opportunity no matter the situation, and is prepared to shut down the government entirely if it doesn't get its way.
So you can't legally cut much of the spending, and you're under constant pressure to cut taxes, not raise them. Your predecessor left you a huge recession, a massive red ink bank bailout, huge military and entitlement spending, and a completely intransigent congress. He's a president, not the magician he would have needed to be to pull out a balanced budget on day 1. There simply wasn't the legal leeway to massively cut spending or massively raise taxes to do so.
Don't just take my word for it - have a look at this graph of obama's time of spending vs bush for some additional background.
Then you factor in that relief and stimulus spending during a recession is considered the correct economic policy to reverse the recession and end it quicker. Once the recession is over, then you can implement austerity to reduce the deficit. Doing austerity too early just worsens the recession, and we end up back in the 1930s. Borrowing money early to get through a crisis is generally considered the right thing to do from prior experience. So a balanced budget on day 1 would have been a really bad idea anyway even if it had been possible.