The people at the Cato Institute are not usually defenders of Democrats, and, in this case, Obama is not being defended. It just appears that way. Apparently, most of the blame for the horrendous deficit of the last year is more the responsibility of W than Obama.

The $3.5 trillion federal budget is mainly the work of the Bush administration because the fiscal year for the government runs from October 1 to September 30. Last year, Bush was in office on October 1.

Daniel Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and claims that the Obama administration is only responsible for $140 billion of that $3.5 trillion budget.

Mitchell pointed out that the stimulus and cash for clunkers were Obama projects, but adding those and others only totals $140 billion.

The stimulus is supposed to be $787 billion, but I assume Mitchell is using only money that has been spent. If so little of the stimulus has been spent that it is less than $140 billion, then that helps explain why the economy is still waiting to get juiced. However, that is another subject.

If Bush is really to blame for 96% of last year’s hefty $3.5 trillion budget, it would seem that a lot of Obama critics should be pointing their fingers towards Texas and not Washington. With this year’s budget projections, there is still plenty of time to blame Obama.