Obama and the Budget

Today, president Obama told an audience of community college students in Virginia that unless the federal governement stopped spending more than it takes in, there will be serious damage to the US economy. He also said that the government is looking for every conceivable place to save money and lower spending. This is the first "town hall meeting" in the Barack Obama "Say Anything Mean Nothing Tour" of 2011. It is amazing that the press never seems to take obama on when he says things like this. Look at the record:

1) During the 2008 campaign and, indeed, during the presidential debates, candidate Obama said that he would go "line by line through the federal budget" to find programs that were wasting funds or that were ineffective. His promise was to reduce federal spending by cutting waste, fraud and ineffectual programs. Obama repeated this promise right after taking office in 2009. In the nearly two and a half years since Obama has taken office, he has done nothing at all to remove wasteful federal programs. He has done nothing to cut fraud and abuse in federal spending. Indeed, there has been no effort made to even identify programs that could be tightened or cut.

2) Just a month ago, the Democrats described the small cuts that the Republicans wanted to make in spending for the remainder of fiscal 2011 as "draconian" with the GOP wanting to prevent women from getting healthcare and the like. Obama and the Democrats had to be drageed kicking and screaming to agree to 38.5 billion dollars of cuts, about half of which came from programs and funds that were unlikely to be spent in any event. Two months ago, Obama proposed a budget that actuallly called for an increase in spending rather than any cuts at all. Now Obama wants the USA to believe that he is suddenly in favor of cutting spending. Of course, he has yet to give any details as to what programs he wants to cut. Such details would have required Obama and his staff to look at the current spending programs and to determine which need to be cut. Since Obama's purported conversion from wanting more spending to cutting spending just happened, it is too soon for Obama to even come up with any specifics. In fact, it is unlikely that Obama will ever propose the specifics. So long as Obama talks about amorphous cuts, he will never have to defend any actual cuts. Only a fool would believe that Obama actually plans to cut anything.

3) During the Obamacare debate, Obama said that waste and fraud in medicare would be cut to save a half a trillion dollars over the following ten years. This savings would be used to finance the cost of Obamacare. During the debate, Obama also said that the savings would be used to rescue medicare from insolvency. Of course, that was double counting, but then again no one ever called Obama a math whiz. Now, Obama is attacking Paul Ryan for trying to save Medicare and Obama's proposed solution is to cut half a trillion dollars of waste and fraud out of the system over the next ten years. That's right, Obama is now trying to use that same half a trillion dollars for the third time. Obviously, this is nonsense, but Obama keeps right on with these claims. I guess Obama assumes that the American people are just too distracted to realize that he is blatantly lying to them.

The problem with Obama's medicare fix gets worse when one looks at the performance of the federal government over the last year. It is over a year since the feds were supposed to begin getting the savings from reducing waste and fraud in medicare. There should have been about 50 billion dollars in savings already. quick, can you tell me how much has been saved so far by Obama's effort to reduce waste and fraud in medicare? If you said NOTHING, you get a gold star for the correct answer. In other words, not only does Obama count the same half trillion dollars of savings three times, he also does nothing to actually come up with even a penny of savings.

4) The deficit reduction commission recommended savings of 4 trillion over ten years. The GOP budget put forth by Ryan and passed by the House, calls for savings of 6.2 trillion dollars over ten years with substantial savings after that. The vague generalities offered by Obama call for savings of ten trillion dollars over twelve years. Even so, Obama and his cronies consistently say that the three plans all amount to around the same savings. So why does Obama use 12 years rather than ten like the other two proposals? the answer is because over one trillion buck of supposed savings come in years 11 and 12. Under Obama outline, the savings over the next ten years is just under three trillion bucks. That is less than half of the GOP proposal for the next decade. Further, since a big chunk of Obama's savings come from the non-existent reduction of waste in medicare, the obama plan is much less than half of the GOP plan. So Obama and his cronies are once again lying to the American people.

5) There has been criticism of the GOP plan from people like S&P and other ratings agencies on the basis that the GOP plan results in balancing the budget too slowly. Cutting 6.2 trillion dollars over the next decade is not enough for these folks. Obama, of course, is cutting the deficit by less than half of the GOP amount, so the ratings agencies will certainly not approve of the Obama plan.

6) Obama made clear not long ago that it will be impossible to come to any resolution with regard to spending if either side were to demagogue the issue. Neither side should accuse the other of bad things or insensitivity according to Obama; that would mean the deathknell for a deal. Of course, Obama and the obamacrats used their first opportunity to make ridiculous attacks on Ryan and the GOP. The Ryan budget proposal does not affect medicare for anyone older than 55. Of course, Obama and his cronies claim that Ryan and the GOP want to balance the budget on the back of poor granny. Forgettiing the lies coming from Obama, there is the awful additional fact that Obama is scaring many gullible seniors into fearing that their Medicare benefits are about to be taken away. For someone who claims to have compassion for the little guy, Obama certainly does his best to inflict maximum harm on them.

Obama has got to go!