RIEDL: Obama’s eight bogus budget arguments

ANALYSIS/OPINION

President Obama has proposed a historic expansion of spending, taxes and debt. His budget would increase real spending from $25,000 per household to $32,000 per household by 2019. It would raise taxes by $1.4 trillion. And it would double the national debt - a staggering $9.3 trillion in new borrowing.

A master communicator, the president employs clever rhetoric to defend his tax-borrow-and-spend budget. Unfortunately, this rhetoric fluctuates between misleading and false. Here are eight of his bogus budget arguments:

Assertion No. 1: “I pledged to cut the deficit in half” by 2013.

Fact: The president doesn’t mention that the deficit has quadrupled this year. Merely cutting it in half from that bloated level would still leave budget deficits twice as high as under President Bush. This is like eating a 5,000 calorie meal, and then pledging to halve your calories from that level.

Furthermore, three upcoming developments - the end of the recession, troop pullout in Iraq, and phase-out of the supposedly temporary “stimulus” spending - would, by themselves, cut the budget deficit in half.

Despite Mr. Obama’s talk of “inheriting” President Bush’s $1.2 trillion deficit for 2009, then-Sen. Obama supported nearly all the policies that created the deficit. That deficit estimate has surged to $1.8 trillion since his inauguration. And when the recession ends, Mr. Obama would still run $1 trillion deficits - compared with President Bush’s $162 billion deficit immediately before this recession.

Assertion No. 2: “We have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.”

Fact: Savings relative to what? The president first creates a fantasy baseline that assumes the Iraq surge continues forever (which was never U.S. policy), and then “saves” $1.5 trillion against that baseline by ending the surge as scheduled. It’s like a family “saving” $10,000 by first assuming an expensive vacation and then not taking it.

Another $1 trillion in “savings” is actually tax increases. Government savings used to mean spending cuts that save taxpayer dollars. In the Obama White House, they mean tax increases that feed the government.

Assertion No. 3: “If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime.”

Fact: This is patently false. The president has already signed into law a 61-cent cigarette tax increase. His budget proposes a $646 billion cap-and-trade tax that would be passed onto households at an average cost of $600 to $2,000 annually.

Assertion No. 4: New spending is “temporary” to fight recession.

Fact: Does anyone believe Mr. Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will allow stimulus bill expansions, including Pell Grants, food stamps and “make-work pay,” to expire? The president’s own budget already extends several expensive stimulus provisions. Overall, his budget would create the largest peacetime government in American history by 2019. There is nothing temporary about it.

Assertion No. 5: Economic “day of reckoning” was caused by a lack of liberal social policies.

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