Where were these teabag folks when Dubya was in office? That president had some core beliefs that were impervious to any empirical qualification.

A case in point: Lower taxes were always good, regardless of the economic climate. In his campaign, Dubya defended his tax cuts as a way to ensure that the burgeoning surplus he inherited would not be swallowed up by government. When the economy sank in the wake of the bursting tech-bubble and 9/11, Dubya defended the tax cuts on opposite grounds: they were necessary as a Keynesian demand stimulus in a contracting economy. When deficits soared in his first term, Dubya cited keeping the tax cuts as a way to prevent a new recession, and thereby prevent future deficits. It soon became apparent that the tax cuts were simply a matter of faith, unrelated to any empirical context or consistent rationale. Even if you supported the tax cuts, it was impossible logically to support every argument Dubya made in their defense, because they were mutually contradictory and constantly changing.

Try this experiment: Under what circumstances would Dubya actually raise taxes? Not for war; not for soaring deficits; not even with annual growth nearing 4 percent. Only one thing you could say for sure: Dubya never defended cutting taxes as a way to curtail the power and scope of government. Nor did he ever insist on balancing the government's books to keep the next generation out of perilous and mounting debt. That sort of conservatism was over. The proof of that came in the staggering expansion of government power and spending under Dubya.

And most of Dubya's tax cuts were back-loaded, with their real costs shunted a few years into the future. The same could be said for Dubya's championing of a dramatic new expansion of Medicare, the government health-care program for the elderly. Put those together and peer toward the horizon and the bankrupting of the American government comes into sharper focus. Barack Obama didn't cause the current day problems; he inherited this mess.