Media Largely Ignore’s Obama’s Record-Breaking 4th Year Of $1 Trillion Deficit
We can get non-stop coverage of Obama’s vacations and golf outings and the first lady’s vegetable garden, but coverage of the nation running a $1 trillion budget deficit for the fourth consective year? Not so much:
None of the Big Three broadcast networks noted the release Friday of the Congressional Budget Office’s final determination of the fiscal year 2012 federal budget deficit: $1.1 trillion, the fourth year in a row of trillion-dollar deficits. ABC, CBS and NBC’s Friday evening newscasts and Saturday morning news programs were silent about the statistic — even though Obama’s massive spending and broken 2008 promise of halving the deficit are central issues of this year’s presidential campaign.
You’d think that this would be all the more newsworthy given that the Obama administration underestimated the budget deficit by more than half a trillion dollars:
In May 2009, President Obama released his updated budget estimates, which projected that the federal deficit for fiscal year 2012 would be $557 billion (see table S-1). The Congressional Budget Office now says that the deficit for fiscal year 2012 (which ended on September 30) was about $1.1 trillion — or about twice what Obama said it would be. In other words, Obama’s estimate was off by more than half a trillion dollars.
Out of control spending. An administration that seems incapable of sane fiscal forecasts. Why would anyone want to report that?
Tags: Barack Obama, election 2012, national debt
