Obama’s Deficit Cutting Will Result In Post-Recession Deficits That Are Higher Than Bush’s Were
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Marc Ambinder, reporter for The Atlantic which is hardly a bastion of anti-Obama sentiment. Ambinder points out that when Obama sets the budget baseline from which he’s going to cut down deficits after the TARP/”stimulus” spending he does, in fact, reduce deficits. But those deficits will still be higher than what the Bush administration left office with.
That deceptive baseline makes all the difference in the world; take it away, and what you have is Obama reducing the deficit from recession-era highs created by TARP and the stimulus package – which are both designed to be temporary anyway – to recovery-era lows that are no lower, as a percentage of GDP, than the deficits Bush ran during his administration’s years of economic growth. (This is leaving aside the rosiness of the growth and revenue-collection scenarios underlying the budget’s number-crunching, and the fact that it only includes a “down payment” on the still-hypothetical health care reform that Obama wants as the domestic-policy centerpiece of his administration.) Now it’s true that some voices within the Obama Administration wanted to run a higher deficit still, and the President apparently sided against them. But that doesn’t change the fact that the projected post-recession deficits are in the same range as Bush’s pre-recession deficits, if not slightly higher.
Basically, what Obama is doing is cutting down deficits he himself inflated and then claiming that he’s cutting deficits created by his predecessors.
I know it’s not fashionable to state it so bluntly in political circles, but in the real world this is what is called a “lie.”
What’s more, what Obama is saying he’s going to cut from the deficits he himself has inflated is itself inflated. Recently Obama’s OMB director Peter Orszag appeared before Congress and was forced to admit under questioning that in order to get the savings Obama is claiming will result from ending the war in Iraq they projected that the war would cost as much as it did during its peak in 2008 for the next 10 years.
Here’s video of that questioning:
Now, given that Obama himself has ordered massive troop withdrawals from Iraq, the idea that the war is going to cost as much as it did during the peak of the surge for the next decade is absurd. But defining war spending as such in order to inflate what Obama can claim he’s cutting in terms of spending is politically convenient for Obama even if it is, again, what those of us living in the real world would term a “lie.” Tags: Asshats, Domestic Issues, Politics
