Reporting on President Obama’s appearance at Facebook headquarters in California this week, the AP writes, “Obama said that unless lawmakers get the country's long-term finances under control, more immediate economic gains could prove difficult. ‘If we don't have a serious plan to tackle the debt and the deficit, that could actually end up being a bigger drag on the economy than anything else,’ Obama said.”
The president calling for “a serious plan to tackle the debt and the deficit” is certainly an interesting statement in light of the poor marks his latest budget plan received following his speech last week.
On top of that, The Washington Post reported last night, “President Obama’s deficit-reduction plan ‘falls short’ of targets set by House Republicans and Obama’s own fiscal commission and would be unlikely to stabilize borrowing, according to a new independent analysis [by the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget]. . . . The new outline is a significant improvement over the budget request Obama submitted to Congress in February, which would have required $9.5 trillion in fresh borrowing through 2021. However, the framework is unlikely to reduce deficits as much as Obama suggested, the analysis found, and would therefore permit the portion of the national debt held by outside investors to continue rising, when measured against the size of the economy, to just less than 80 percent of gross domestic product by the end of the decade. By contrast, the budget blueprint adopted last week by the House matches the fiscal commission’s plan ‘dollar for dollar’ with new savings, according to the analysis.”
The Post notes, “‘At the same time, when compared to the House budget and Fiscal Commission plan, the President’s Framework falls short,’ the analysis says, adding that the level of savings achieved by both the GOP plan and the fiscal commission ‘is the minimum level of savings policymakers should aim for.’”
According to the article, “White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage defended the president’s plan, arguing that the committee’s analysis relies on economic forecasts by the Congressional Budget Office that are less optimistic than forecasts by the White House budget office. ‘Under the administration’s estimates, the president’s framework saves $2.9 trillion over 10 years and $4 trillion over 12 years,’ Brundage said.”
It’s worth pointing out, though, that even granting the assumptions in the president’s plan, the $2.9 trillion shaved off the deficit over 10 years that the White House’s spokeswoman asserts, is less than the amount that has been added to the debt over the last two years. According to the Treasury Department’s website, the total public debt was more than $10.6 trillion on the day of President Obama’s inauguration, and was more than $14 trillion two years later, an increase of over $3.4 trillion in just 24 months.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) responded to the president’s speech about the debt, "With all due respect, the American people are not inclined to take advice on fiscal responsibility from an administration who’s unprecedented borrowing and spending has done so much to create the mess we’re in. After two years of adding trillions to the debt and ignoring our nation's looming fiscal nightmare, the President may be right in thinking that the politically expedient thing to do is point the finger at others. But the truly responsible thing would be to admit that his own two-year experiment in big government has been a disaster for the economy and itself a major driver of our debt; and that his inaction on the latter is the primary reason others have been forced to step forward and offer meaningful solutions of their own.”
Obama's sudden claim to want "A Serious Plan" on the debt is more campaign political rhetoric that rings hollow when confronted by the facts. Thus the use of the above image, "Had Enough Yet?" Here is a small portion of the facts: Obama's administration's "over the top" "super sized" big spending; his dragging the US into a third regional conflict and wasting "blood and treasure" in a region of little interest to the US; his banning American companies from drilling for critically needed oil while providing American tax dollars to underwrite drilling by foreign countries; his continued expansion of government departments' oversight of American citizens. The President is responsible for border security but has evidenced an unwillingness to secure American borders and to protect Americans and American interests. The list is almost endless' and our resources are almost at an end. However, Obama keeps smiling and raising campaign funds, keeps fabricating rhetoric, and keeps attacking TEA Party and other American citizens concerned about government big spending and waste. His actions evidence that he is not really interested in "a serious plan" on the debt other than pushing for higher taxes and more redistribution of wealth primarily for use by Big Government.
Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum summed it up best recently in identifying why Obama does not wish to cut deficit federal spending: "Obama's profligate deficit spending confirms the researchers who discovered that Obama absorbed the Frances Fox Piven strategy, which he learned from her own lips as a principal speaker at a Socialist Party Scholars Conference in New York in 1983 when Obama was a student at Columbia University. The strategy is to flood the welfare system with more recipients than taxpayers can afford, thereby creating a financial and political crisis that will doom the capitalist system and move the U.S. into Socialism."
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