President Barack Obama can’t speak about our nation’s fiscal future without first blaming his predecessor for our current deficits. Just this Tuesday in Annandale, Virginia, he stated:

I think everybody needs to recall, we had a surplus back in 2000, 11 short years ago, but then we cut taxes for everybody, including millionaires and billionaires. We fought two wars and we created a new and expensive prescription drug program, and we didn’t pay for any of it.

While President Bush’s Medicare expansion did have its conservative supporters and detractors, neither the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, nor the Iraq war are the cause of our current $1.3 trillion budget deficit. Furthermore, Obama’s debt record is just an order of magnitude worse than Bush’s. Using data from the U.S. Treasury’s Debt to the Penny, site, during Bush’s eight years in office the federal government’s total outstanding public debt increased from $5.7 trillion to $10.6 trillion. That translates to $4.9 trillion over eight years, or $610 billion per year. Meanwhile, in just the 27 months Obama has been in office, the debt has risen $3.6 trillion to $14.2 trillion. That is $1.6 trillion per year, which is three times as worse as Bush’s debt pace.

But what caused Bush’s deficits? Was it taxes and war like Obama claims? No. The Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl has definitively shown that is not true. Between 2001 and 2010, the CBO published 28 updates to its budget baseline projections, each of which specified the cause of our deteriorating fiscal situation. Riedl combined these 28 updates to identify the causes of the swing from surplus to deficits. He found that “economic and technical revisions” (e.g. tech stock bubble and 9/11) caused 33% of the swing. Other new spending, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Medicare expansion accounted for another 32%. Then the tax cuts came in at 14%, followed by net interest costs on debt at 12%, and other tax cuts (like the 2008 rebates) at 3%. You can see his work and the full chart here. Riedl notes: “Even if these tax cuts had never been enacted, spending and economic factors would have guaranteed more than $4 trillion in deficits over the decade, and kept the budget in deficit every year except 2007.”

Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were supported by overwhelmingly bipartisan majorities in both chambers of Congress. Furthermore, President Obama never voiced opposition to the Afghanistan operation and, in fact, ordered more troops there after he was sworn into office. On Iraq, the CBO has confirmed that the first eight years of that war actually cost less, $709 billion, than President Obama’s failed economic stimulus, $862 billion.

And while Bush’s Medicare expansion did add a $400 billion hole to our nation’s bottom line, let’s remember that the Democratic alternative to the Bush plan cost $800 billion. President Obama has only made this mistake worse by adding a trillion dollar health spending expansion of his own.

Before the 2008 recession, federal spending held steady between between 18 and 22 percent of GDP. But In 2009 and 2010, federal spending reached 24.7 percent and 23.8 percent of GDP, respectively. Our nation’s deficits are a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Unless President Obama enacts crippling trillion dollar tax hikes on the rich and middle class alike, his debt and deficit record will continue to be much, much worse than President Bush.