-By Warner Todd Huston
New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes recently made the outlandish claim that the President’s budget will reduce the deficit by $5.3 trillion over a ten-year period. But a closer look at this claim proves that it just isn’t true.
Don’t look behind that curtain!
Firstly, Obama and his surrogates don’t even claim a savings of $5.3 trillion, so it is a mystery where Calmes got this number. At the late Democrat convention, for instance, Bill Clinton claimed that Obama’s plan would save $4 trillion, not $5.3. But even Clinton’s mythical savings was deemed untrue by the Washington Post’s fact checker.
Worse, all those supposed savings in the Obama proposal is from tax hikes, not any actual cuts in spending. On top of that, most of the supposed savings are mere accounting gimmicks, not true savings.
The other false characterization of Obama’s spending proposal is that he means to “pay down out debt.” To pay down something, of course, that means to pay off or reduce that something. Obama’s plan also does not do this.
The truth is, Obama’s latest budget proposal, which calls for $1.8 trillion in new taxes, calls for $1.5 trillion in new spending! That means that Obama’s massive tax hike proposal doesn’t go to pay down the deficit but to fund new government spending.
Far from spending the deficit down, the president’s last budget plan from July makes it clear that in ten years our national debt will increase by $10.6 trillion.
But despite all the evidence proving the lie to Obama’s budget — a budget that garnered not one vote from either party in the House or Senate — his campaign has repeatedly made the false claim that he’d save $4 trillion over ten years and now The New York Times has inexplicably upped that fantasy savings to $5.3 trillion.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) has already called on the Obama campaign to pull these misleading ads. The Romney campaign should too.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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