Politico posted an article last night that highlights Republican claims that the national deficit will be Obama’s downfall. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) was quoted as saying: “This is not an inherited situation. This was a matter entirely of this administration’s and this Democratic leadership’s making.”

Cornyn’s statement is an easily disproved lie. The current deficit is $11.4 trillion and that hefty sum was not amassed in the less than five months Obama has been in office. The New York Times analyzed nearly ten years worth of CBO reports to find the cause of the deficit. Their findings show that, while Obama is not above reproach, the majority of the deficit was very much an inherited situation.

The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years.

You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

The percentage breakdown of that “$2 trillion swing” goes as follows: Business Cycle- 37%, Bush Legislation- 33%, Obama’s Bush Extensions- 20%, and Obama’s Policies- 10%. That last group breaks down into two parts– 7% is from the stimulus bill and 3% from policy agendas in areas like health care and the environment. 10% of $2 trillion isn’t particularly damning. It is, at worst, Achilles’ collarbone.