Obama Set To Increase Spending by $2.1 Trillion, Increase Federal Deficit By $3.3 Trillion
It’s all part of his plan to cut the deficit by increasing it.
The reason the government will continue to run massive deficits under this budget plan is because President Obama is a world-class spender.
Forget the phony straw-man “baseline” they present (according to their accounting, they “cut” spending by nearly $1 trillion over ten years).
Let’s start with the baseline before they cook the books. It shows a ten-year (2010 to 2019) deficit of $1.6 trillion, with taxes of $37.6 trillion, spending of $35.8 trillion, and net interest costs of $3.4 trillion over that period (these numbers can be calculated — with some effort — from the bridge tables the Administration provided).
The Obama budget, however, spends $37.7 trillion over ten years, or $1.8 trillion more than the real baseline. And that doesn’t even count the health-care plan, which would add another $0.3 trillion (some of the $0.6 in added health-care costs are offset with spending cuts).
All totaled, then, the Obama budget increases spending by about $2.1 trillion. Throw interest costs for all the new debt in and total outlays will go up by nearly $3.3 trillion over the coming decade.
In summary, the only reason Obama can claim that he’s going to cut spending and deficits is because he and his people start with a phony-baloney baseline of spending. That baseline isn’t set at the end of the Bush administration, as you would expect it to be what with all his talk of inherited deficits, but rather after the stimulus spending. Meaning that Obama spent $787 billion on the stimulus, increased the deficit, and then said he’s going to cut down the deficit from there. And he does appear to plan to cut the gigantic deficit that he first created, but that’s going to take years. And will still leave us with larger deficits than we had under President Bush.
It takes a special kind of dishonesty to engage in this sort of bald-faced accounting shenanigans, and it takes an especially corrupt media not to call Obama out on it. But those are the times we live in, I guess.
