'Defending The Bush Deficits'

This is telling, and kind of funny. This is how the National Review Online talks about budget deficits when a Republican is in office (this is from September, 2004 -- keep in mind that the recovery from the recession under Obama has been stronger than under Bush)

Defending The Bush Deficits, by Aman Verjee, NRO: It’s not hard to do if you look at the data.

Since President Bush took office in 2000, the economy has gone through at least three major shocks that were not of his making: a major terrorist attack that damped consumer confidence; the depression in business spending that followed the bursting of the stock market bubble; and a series of accounting scandals that afflicted some of the largest and most visible corporations in the United States.

Yet, the U.S. economy has outperformed that of every other G7 country since 2001. ... This remarkable record on the economy owes much to the pro-growth policies of the Bush administration. ...

Like Chicken Little, who caviled because she mistook a tumbling acorn for a crashing sky, President Bush’s critics are unjustified when they foretell of an impending economic doom. Alarmists who worry about the historical heights to which deficits have climbed need to review the historical data for some context. ...

At the end of 2003, federal debt stood at 36 percent of GDP. It is currently projected by the Congressional Budget Office to reach 40 percent of GDP by 2005 before it begins to decline again. By historical and international standards, these levels of debt are very modest. For instance, the debt burdens of Germany and France are over 60 percent of GDP; in Japan, debt is almost 150 percent of GDP. ... The president’s critics might suggest that economic growth should have been better in the low-debt years than in the high-debt years, but in fact, real GDP growth averaged 4.44 percent in the high-debt years and just 3.14 percent in the low-debt years. ...

Looking back at American history, it is apparent that economic prosperity can continue even if the federal government maintains a debt burden that is much higher than it is today as a percentage of GDP. ...

The lesson is clear: Economic prosperity can continue even if the federal government never balances its budget. ...