This chart was controversial! Megan McArdle said it was a bad chart and she made her own, different charts, that were much less effective in clearly communicating a complex idea simply. But basically she is all, don’t blame Bush, because the deficit is bigger now, under Obama, and then Jon Chait was like, yes, the deficit is bigger under Obama because of Bush policies plus massive recession, duh.

Then the Toronto Globe and Mail made a chart making fun of Americans for worrying about the debt while paying less in taxes than every other developed nation besides Mexico and Chile. (We’re No. 3!) This was accompanied by a chart showing how all these other countries make a lot of money from their taxes. Then James Fallows posted another chart, from Calculated Risk, showing that we have lost a lot of jobs and are not really getting those jobs back.

Nancy Pelosi made a chart that Politifact didn’t like. The Daily Caller didn’t like all these charts that correctly laid the blame for the deficit on Bush’s policies, so it had a former OMB deputy director make a chart blaming Obama (primarily for … continuing Bush-era policies). In this chart, Obama is red, and Bush is blue. Those Caller guys play by their own rules!

Mint.com made this huge infographic full of bloggy fake-nice “good design” that actually ends up being not a very good way of conveying all the information the infographic is supposed to be elegantly presenting. (The double-pyramid thing with the squiggly downward-trending line is just an illustration, right? Not actually representative of actual data?)

All of these followed on the heels of the classic chart that showed how the debt would be less without expensive things like wars and tax cuts. This chart, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, comes in both debt and deficit versions. And there are hundreds more!

I’ve made this chart illustrating the recent explosion in charts designed to explain the causes and size of the federal deficit:

This is the one essential chart every debate over deficit charts should include.

Bolton, the former U.N. envoy too war-loving even for the Bush administration (they sent him to the U.N. purely because appointing a psychopath ambassador was a good way to prove their utter contempt for the institution), is concerned that the deal could hypothetically involve defense budget spending reductions “as much as three percent below” our current $700 billion defense budget, which has grown by around 9% annually for a decade.

Depending on the outcome of further negotiations over the size and allocation of those reductions, these cuts alone may well be quite harmful. The best that can be said is that, for these fiscal years, the issue is still unresolved.

Will we be able to afford enough bombs to bomb Iran in this new austere future? Unclear at this time. (But probably, we usually find money for bombs.)

Pam Geller’s dream-boyfriend is even more alarmed at the prospect of the “trigger cuts” to agency budgets that would happen if the super-congress can’t agree on our second round of austerity measures. The Department of Defense could lose… less than $500 billion, over the course of ten years, beginning in 2013, unless another Congress does something about it, which another Congress obviously would, because Congress refuses to ever allow defense budget cuts!

Defense spending is not just another wasteful government program. Subjecting it to potentially massive, debilitating cuts is rolling the dice in perilous times internationally. Adam Smith himself wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “the first duty of the sovereign” is “protecting the society from the violence and invasion” of others.

Adam Smith says we need a trillion-dollar defense budget, you say? Who am I to argue with the inventor of American capitalism!

Hah, wait, there is one other person who takes Bolton seriously, apparently: Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post blogger. Fiscal conservatism is well and good, but endless war forever against the vast Muslim menace is the real priority. (Al Qaeda might attack Norway again, right, Jennifer?)

(Mitt Romney also doesn’t like the deal but that’s only because he’s trying to be the first 2012er to come out forcefully against it.)

Walsh is an outspoken camera-hogging Tea Party die-hard in a not-particularly safe suburban Chicago district. Though he may switch districts and mount a primary run against another Republican in 2012, in which case his unrepentant Tea Partyism could turn out to be quite helpful. Not really this stuff, so much, though primary voters often favor “shouting a lot” over “accomplishing things.” (That’s the Anthony Weiner story, too.)

Also, fun fact from the Sun-Times: “Walsh is not the only current congressman with an order withholding part of his paycheck for child support, said Dan Weiser, a spokesman for the U.S. House of Representatives.” Hah, what?

Update: The Sun-Times has altered the bit quoted above, which now reads: “Congress has withheld child support money from members’ paychecks over the years when ordered by a court, said Dan Weiser, a spokesman for the U.S. House of Representatives.” The point is, Walsh is not the only congressperson to have child support withheld, by court order. (In addition, while the first line is a joke, it is not a strictly factually accurate joke — Walsh does have money deducted from his paycheck for child support, but not for the past-due money he owes his ex-wife.)

Bush’s tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are the obvious big-ticket items. The tax cuts, in particular, are the structural-deficit-gift that keeps on giving. As the New York Times observes, if all of the Bush tax cuts “expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels.”

Or, as James Fallows puts it more acidly, “It demonstrates the utter incoherence of being very concerned about a structural federal deficit but ruling out of consideration the policy that was largest single contributor to that deficit, namely the Bush-era tax cuts.

But this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, news. Nor is there any evidence that promulgating this information has any effect on the political process or on popular opinion. And there’s a very good reason for this: The debt ceiling is not a fight about the deficit. It’s a fight over power and the size of government.

“Utter incoherence” becomes entirely coherent when one considers that Republican strategy is founded on two things: neutering Obama and rolling back the welfare state. Tax cuts are always good, because eventually they starve the beast. That’s how to make sense of the seemingly contradictory actions of a party that just eight months ago voted for a package of tax cuts raising the annual deficit by about $200 billion turning around and suddenly declaring that the deficit is the greatest existential threat the nation faces. How else can we explain Republicans’ turning down huge deficit reduction deals, and then settling on a strategy — a short-term debt ceiling hike — whose only real attraction is that it directly contravenes the president’s oft-expressed desire for a long-term hike? The point is not to fix government finances; it’s to deny Obama anything he can call a victory while at the same time slashing the size of government so as to ensure that rich people pay low taxes.

An infinite number of charts pointing out who caused the deficit will never change that dynamic.

Today, I introduced a unique bill that goes in a completely different direction than everything else we’ve been hearing out of Washington. It would force politicians to start practicing what they’ve been preaching by lowering the debt ceiling from $14.3 trillion back down to $13 trillion. Admittedly, this is not your run-of-the-mill kind of law, but it would make it imperative for Congress to think outside of the box and come up with ways to pay off a portion of our debt while drastically cutting back spending. Since 1996, the national debt has increased by an inexcusable $8.79 trillion. I firmly believe that this calls for emergency measures to reduce the debt.

Yep! That is Rep. Paul Broun’s proposal. America should make it so that we have already defaulted on our Treasury debt. We should retroactively blow up our economy, in the name of fiscal responsibility.

The best part isn’t even that this patently idiotic piece of fantasy-legislation (hell if the liberals wanna raise the debt ceiling I say we should lower it!!!) was proposed by an elected member of the House of Representatives, but that the people in charge of the homebase of the supposed intellectual wing of the conservative movement thought it was so clever that they invited the bill’s author to write a little blog post explaining his idea, to their readers. “Hey, this Confederate-sympather back-bencher moron is on to something!!”

Way to go, politics.