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Here's Joe Scarborough on Wednesday morning, blaming President Obama for not paying down George W. Bush's and Ronald Reagan's tab fast enough.

SCARBOROUGH: Let's just talk straight. George Bush left him with a trillion dollar deficit. He has answered that by increasing the deficit for four years in a row. The biggest deficits ever. The fastest rate of growth ever. The biggest entitlement spending ever. The biggest defense spending ever. The biggest discretionary domestic spending ever. In every single category, there is not a close second...this guy makes George Bush look like Calvin Coolidge.

What was absolutely amazing about that remark and this discussion generally was the conflation by Scarborough and former Bush mouthpiece Nicole Wallace of deficits and spending. It shouldn't have to be pointed out that they aren't the same thing.

This is the little bait and switch Republicans have been pulling all along. The deficit isn't just a product of "spending" but of historically-low taxes and the worst economic crash since the Great Depression, which started in 2007, under their watch.

Question: who thinks President Obama was going to reduce the deficit with two wars in progress, the worst crash since the Great Depression and with historically low taxes?

Scarborough, who's not too big on facts these days, must not have Bruce Bartlett's column in the New York Times yesterday, which he clearly demonstrates that the bulk of the debt is due to George W. Bush and the GOP's policies.

Republicans assert that Barack Obama assumed sole responsibility for the budget on Jan. 20, 2009. From that date, all increases in the debt or deficit are his responsibility and no one else’s, they say.

This is, of course, nonsense – and the American people know it. As I documented in a previous post, even today 43 percent of them hold George W. Bush responsible for the current budget deficit versus only 14 percent who blame Mr. Obama. [...]

Republicans would have us believe that somehow we could have avoided the recession and balanced the budget since 2009 if only they had been in charge. This would be a neat trick considering that the recession began in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

They would also have us believe that all of the increase in debt resulted solely from higher spending, nothing from lower revenues caused by tax cuts. And they continually imply that one of the least popular spending increases of recent years, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, was an Obama administration program, when in fact it was a Bush administration initiative proposed by the Treasury Department that was signed into law by Mr. Bush on Oct. 3, 2008.

If he missed that, there was also the MarketWatch piece that showed that debunked the "Obama spending binge" myth -- not to mention all of the work Paul Krugman's done in exposing this Big Lie.

Under their hero Ronald Reagan, the debt nearly tripled, and under George W. Bush, it doubled. Republicans therefore have absolutely no credibility on the matter, and the appropriate response when they bring it up is to mock them dismissively, as Obama did.