Pseudo-Mathematics of the Obama Budget Plan

By Jim
President Obama’s recent budget proposal has all the Democrats crooning, and Republicans fuming. Only politicians would even consider calling a slightly smaller deficit increase a “budget cut”, but this is exactly what Obama’s plan tries. Any budget plan which ends up increasing the Federal Debt to over 100% of GDP in 10 years should be deemed as pure fiscal insanity, and the Republicans should work hard against this proposal and any other budget plan (Democrat OR Republican) that does not provide significant change to reduce and eliminate current and future debt obligations.

I recently read an article published by the Cato Institute in the National Review, written by Michael D. Tanner which summarizes and points out much of the deceptive math calculated to “sell” this budget plan to the public and politicians in Washington, D.C. I thought this article did a great job of summarizing the budget and I wanted to share it with our readers. As the author correctly states, “The president’s budget is dishonest and irresponsible.”

The president actually counts $681 billion in cuts that were agreed to last year as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling. Shouldn’t there be some sort of statute of limitations for how long you can claim credit for cuts that you have already made? And it should probably be shorter for cuts that you fought against every step of the way. The president also counts as a cut the $741 billion we will save from not occupying Iraq over the next 10 years, and from not being in Afghanistan a decade from now. Considering that we were never going to spend that money in the first place, that seems like slightly dishonest accounting. After all, think of all the savings we can claim by not invading Syria. And, finally, $595 billion of the claimed budget cuts is actually interest savings resulting from not having to borrow for the other phony cuts.

On the other hand, the president’s budget does include plenty of new spending. For example, there is $476 billion in new spending over 10 years for transportation projects, including the president’s favorite boondoggle, “high-speed rail.” There are also the usual bailouts for profligate state governments and teachers’ unions, including $30 billion to build more schools and $30 billion to hire teachers. Another stimulus anyone?

Read the entire article here: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=14110

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