The 10% President

President Barack Obama, annotated by the Wall Street Journal.

When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history.[1] And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90% of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren't paid for,[2] as a consequence of tax cuts that weren't paid for,[3] a prescription drug plan that was not paid for,[4] and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.[5]

"Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10% of this increase in the deficit,[6] and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.[7]

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Short version: As Mary McCarthy famously said of Lillian Hellman, "every word [he says] is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."