Here's President Blameshifter explaining why he failed to fulfill his February 2009 promise to cut the budget deficit in half in his first term:
"…this recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of else realized," Obama said about his inability to cut the deficit in half."Everybody who is out there back in 2009, if you look back what their estimates were in terms of how many jobs had been lost, how bad the economy had contracted when I took office everybody had underestimated it. People thought that the economy contracted 3%, it turns it was close to 9%. We lost 8 million jobs just in a year's span, about half a year before I took office and about a half a year after I took office," Obama said.
"So, the die had been cast and a lot of us didn't understand how bad it was going to get. That increases the deficit because less tax revenues come in and it means more people are getting unemployment insurance, we're helping states more so they don't teachers, etc. The key though is that we're setting ourselves on a path so that we can get our debt under control."
Here is what Obama's failure means in real terms:
According to the White House’s own figures (see table S-1 here for 2011 to 2013, and table S-1 here for 2010), the actual or projected deficit tallies for the four years in which Obama has submitted budgets are as follows: $1.293 trillion in 2010, $1.300 trillion in 2011, $1.327 trillion in 2012, and $901 billion in 2013. In addition, Obama is responsible for the estimated $200 billion (the Congressional Budget Office’s figure) that his economic “stimulus” added to the deficit in 2009. Moreover, he shouldn’t get credit for the $149 billion in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) repayments made in 2010 and 2011 to cover most of the $154 billion in bank loans that remained unpaid at the end of the 2009 fiscal year — loans that count against President Bush’s 2009 deficit tally.Adding all of this up, deficit spending during Obama’s four years in the White House (based on his own figures) will be an estimated $5.170 trillion — or $5,170,000,000,000.00.
To help put that colossal sum of money into perspective, if you take our deficit spending under Obama and divide it evenly among the roughly 300 million American citizens, that works out to just over $17,000 per person — or about $70,000 for a family of four.
We also had a 2009 deficit of $1.413 trillion. That fiscal year was shared between Presidents Bush and Obama, with Obama being the President for over 2/3rd's of it.
Prior to Obama becoming President, the largest single year federal deficit in the history of the United States was $458.6 billion. Only two years in American history saw federal deficits over $400 trillion. No President in American history has come close to running up the debt Obama has run up.
All this leads me to Obama's fourth budget proposal, which was released the other day. Here's how President Blameshifter allegedly puts us "on a path so that we can get our debt under control". According to Obama's budget proposal (you can find it at a previous link), by the year 2022 the federal deficit would be "slashed" to "only"….drumroll please…$704 BILLION…which would still be the largest federal deficit in American history prior to Obama becoming President !!!
You go, Barack !!! What a leader !!! I sure want you for a second term !!!…or NOT.
I can hardly wait to hear President Blameshifter's explanation for how that $704 billion deficit in 2022 is Bush's fault.
As the USA Today so aptly put it, 'Obama's Budget Plan Leaves Debt Bomb Ticking':
The election-year budget President Obama sent to Congress on Monday fails that test. Yes, Obama's budget has a lot of deficit reduction — some $4 trillion over the next 10 years. But the plan would still add $6.7 trillion in deficits over the next decade, with the debt-to-GDP ratio creeping up to about 77% through 2022. Beyond that, long-term figures buried deep inside the budget show the debt would shoot up again after 2022 and just keep going, driven by an aging population and the escalating cost of Social Security and health care.By comparison, credible proposals from Obama's own deficit-reduction commission and by the Bipartisan Policy Center in 2010 both aimed at reducing the debt to 60% of GDP and keeping it headed down. Obama's plan does not even begin to do that. Nor, for that matter, does it fulfill his 2009 promise to halve the deficit by the end of his first term.
The USA Today only got one thing wrong there. Obama's budget plan does NOT have deficit reduction of $4 trillion over ten years. What it has is a deficit explosion of $6.7 trillion over ten years. The alleged "deficit reduction" only means Obama isn't going to run up as much debt as he planned to in his previous budget plans. Only in governo-doubletalk Newspeak can adding trillions of dollars in new deficits be referred to as "deficit reduction". Sometimes I think politicians are incapable of being honest. I'm fully convinced Obama is incapable.
Obama's budget plan doesn't fix our fiscal problems. It's a joke (and the joke is on us):
But the reason the president's budget doesn't fix the longer-term problem is that for all its spending cuts and revenue increases, it relies on gimmicks and avoids some problems instead of tackling them.Most glaringly, Obama takes credit for about $850 billion in savings from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were paid for with borrowed money in the first place. These aren't "savings," notes the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "When you finish college, you don't suddenly have thousands of dollars a year to spend elsewhere — in fact, you have to find a way to pay back your loans."
In the problem-avoidance department, the administration continues to pretend that Social Security needs no fixes because it doesn't add to the budget deficit. Really? The administration's own numbers — see page 465 of the Analytical Perspectives released with the budget — show that the program is in the red and will drain the Treasury of half a trillion dollars from 2011 to 2017. Even in Washington, that's serious money.
Obama basically sticks to the liberal game plan – cut the military, raise taxes on the rich, and then pretend the real problems don't exist. He makes some inconsequential cuts to some departments, and raises the budgets of others.
The Republicans were quick to jump all over Obama's budget, saying the President's "deficit reductions" are exaggerated. From The NY Times:
At the heart of Republican objections is accounting. Mr. Obama boasted of $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next 10 years in his proposal. Republican budget writers on Capitol Hill saw a fraction of that, as little as $300 billion.At issue is how the government projects spending and deficits. Of the $4 trillion in deficit reduction noted by the White House, $3 trillion would come from tax increases and spending cuts. Another $900 billion would come from domestic spending caps agreed to with Republicans last year to resolve the impasse over raising the nation’s statutory borrowing limit.
But if Congress and the president did nothing but continue current policies, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, said the accumulated debt over the next 10 years would be only $300 billion higher than the debt Mr. Obama is projecting if all his policies are adopted.
In large part, that is because automatic cuts to military and nonmilitary programs totaling $1.2 trillion are already set to go in force in 2013. The Obama budget assumes those cuts will not happen. The president also assumes that sharp cuts to reimbursement rates for doctors treating Medicare patients will not ever go into force. Republicans say that effectively negates $522 billion over 10 years.
Republicans also protest that President Obama is “saving” nearly $1 trillion by not spending over the coming decade what the United States has spent each year on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. True, a Republican administration may have unwound those wars more slowly than the Obama administration has, but Republican budget writers say that no one believes combat costs would have stayed steady over the next 10 years. Therefore, counting savings is misleading, Republicans say, since the savings come from money that would never have been spent.
As Senate Budget Committee Republicans count it, the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts that Mr. Obama wants to negate, the $522 billion in Medicare physician reimbursement costs and the war savings from spending that was never going to happen should be subtracted from the $3 trillion in new deficit reduction that the White House is presenting. That leaves about $300 billion in real deficit reduction over the coming decade.
So much for "deficit reduction".
Obama's previous budget proposal failed in the Senate by a unanimous bipartisan vote of 97-0. I doubt this one will get much further, and I doubt Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) will even bring it up for a vote. The Democrat-led Senate is averse to doing their jobs and passing budgets these days. That's why the Democrats haven't passesd a budget in three years. They're afraid the American people might find out the truth about them, which could really hurt at the ballot box. The only party passing budgets and solutions to our real problems are found over in the Republican-led House. The Republicans are the people Obama and Reid call "obstructionists"…and they think you are dumb enough to believe it.
P.S. – President Obama's first budget proposal in 2009 was laughably named 'A New Era Of Responsibility". Since that time, Obama has run up $4.47 trillion in new debt. It will be well over $5 trillion by the time the election rolls around.
Anybody But Obama in 2012. I beg you once again. The future of our country depends on it.
