Could it be – he LIED?
No, lie is obviously too strong a word, otherwise the US media wouldn’t have any problem using it.
All along, the Obama administration has consistently been playing down the US federal debt numbers, calling it “less than projected,” while the compliant media dutifully reported his claim that he would “halve the US debt by the end of his first term.”
Strangely, even as Obama pledged to cut the debt by $1.3 trillion, the CBO just released a report showing Obama thus far is spending over $1 trillion more than he pledged to cut, and $2.3 trillion more than he projected he would over ten years. An increase of $1 trillion dollars per year – not much of a reduction there.
Asked by Ben “Big” Feller of AP back in February about just his 2012 budget, Obama tripped the “Lie Meter” by saying “We will not be adding more to the national debt. It’s — so, to use a — sort of, an analogy that families are familiar with, we’re not going to be running up the credit card anymore.”
Oops, lied wrong again.
AP now reports the reason for the “understatement” in Obama’s budget numbers;
The difference is chiefly because CBO has a less optimistic estimate of how much the government will collect in tax revenues, partly because the administration has rosier economic projections.
But the agency also rejects the administration’s claims of more than $300 billion of that savings — to pay for preventing a cut in Medicare payments to doctors — because it doesn’t specify where it would come from. Likewise, CBO fails to credit the White House with an additional $328 billion that would come from unspecified “bipartisan financing” to pay for transportation infrastructure projects such as high speed rail lines and road and bridge construction.
They’re trying to provide cover, they really are. Maybe “just trying” will be enough to keep the invitations coming to the White House parties…
Not to fear, Obama can be excused for any differences because as Doug Powers writes, math is hard;
None of this should come as a surprise, since we’re talking about a president who once said he didn’t always do his math homework as a child and is on record as stating that accounting is an inexact science (try using that one on your IRS auditor).
Full CBO report here.
