From The Hill.

Excerpt:

President Obama’s budget director Jack Lew in a Sunday opinion piece outlined some off the “tough choices” Obama is willing to make to cut spending in his 2012 budget request due out on Feb. 14.

The piece details cuts that affect initiatives dear to the president: programs to help the poor and to clean up the Great Lakes near the president’s home state of Illinois.

The cuts are relatively small, however, in the larger scheme of things. In total, the $775 million in detailed cuts fall far short of demands by congressional Republicans and will do little toward tackling the deficit, which is estimated to be $1.5 trillion this year by the Congressional Budget Office. The cuts are in addition to a five-year spending freeze which the administration says will save $400 billion over the next decade.

[…][Lew] said “this cut is not easy for” Obama.

The 2012 deficit is projected to be 1,500,000 million. TWELVE TIMES what the last Republican budget was back in 2007, when unemployment was at 4.3%. Government spending means taking money away from productive workers and from the businesses that hire those productive workers.

To see a graphical representation of the cuts as a portion of the entire budget, click here. The cuts cannot be seen with the naked eye, so the there are several images in that post, each one more zoomed in than the last.

Here’s the story from CNS News, which the OFFICIAL NUMBERS from the Treasury Department.

Excerpt:

In the 1,461 days that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) served as speaker of the House, the national debt increased by a total of $5.343 trillion ($5,343,452,800,321.37) or $3.66 billion per day ($3.657,394,113.84), according to official debt numbers published by the U.S. Treasury.

Pelosi was the 52nd speaker of the House. During her tenure, she amassed more debt than the first 49 speakers combined.

[…]When Pelosi was sworn in on Jan. 4, 2007, the national debt stood at $8,670,596,242,973.04. At the close of business on Jan. 4, 2011, her last full day in the speakership, it stood at 14,014,049,043,294.41–an increase of $5,343,452,800,321.37.

[…]When Pelosi became speaker in  January 2007 she was emphatic that there would be no new deficit spending.

“After years of historic deficits, this 110th Congress will commit itself to a higher standard: Pay as you go, no new deficit spending,” she said in her inaugural address from the speaker’s podium. “Our new America will provide unlimited opportunity for future generations, not burden them with mountains of debt.”

And a quick refresher about who controlled the House and the Senate at different times:

All government spending originates in the House of Representatives, so spending was a Democrat problem since the Democrats took over the House (and Senate) in January 2007. They own this recession.

And the reason that things went well in the Clinton Presidency is because the Republicans were in control of all the spending.