You have to give President Obama credit for chutzpah. He pushed through a faux stimulus in his first year and Obamacare in his second year, both of which significantly increased the burden of government spending.
In the past two years, he’s basically punted, proposing budgets that are so laughably unserious that they received zero votes in both the House and Senate. Including zero votes from Democrats.
But now he wants us to believe he favors a moderate-sounding deal that supposedly would reduce spending by $2.50 for every $1 of tax hikes.
This is utter fantasy and even leftists admit the President is engaging in gimmickry far beyond the smoke-and-mirrors chicanery that you normally find in Washington. Here’s some of what Reason’s Peter Suderman wrote about the topic.
President Obama described what he thought were the prospects for a big budget deal in the early part of a potential second term. “It will probably be messy,” he said. “It won’t be pleasant. But I am absolutely confident that we can get what is the equivalent of the grand bargain that essentially I’ve been offering to the Republicans for a very long time, which is $2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in spending, and work to reduce the costs of our health care programs.”
The president went on to suggest that such a deal could help the federal government start digging its way out of the deep debt hole it’s currently in. “And we can easily meet — ‘easily’ is the wrong word — we can credibly meet the target that the Bowles-Simpson Commission established of $4 trillion in deficit reduction…” Here’s the thing. That $4 trillion debt plan he’s offered so far? It doesn’t actually reduce deficits by $4 trillion. That’s because it’s packed with budget savings gimmicks. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) explains: “To reach his $4.3 trillion in savings through 2021, the President’s budget counts $1.6 trillion (excluding interest) of already-enacted savings…” This isn’t a lonely opinion either. As The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler wrote in September, “virtually no serious budget analyst” accepts the president’s $4 trillion deficit reduction figure. …What about the $2 trillion in deficit reduction the plan can claim to put on the scoreboard? It comes almost entirely tax increases. As James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute shows, the plan would result in about $1.735 trillion in tax hikes — and just $230 billion in spending cuts, the vast majority of which are cuts to health care provider reimbursements of dubious long-term value. That’s Obama’s idea of a grand bargain. Not $4 trillion in deficit reduction weighted toward spending cuts, but $2 trillion worth deficit reduction produced almost entirely by tax hikes.
The last part is the key. A $2 trillion package that is almost 87 percent tax hikes.
But I think Peter is being too kind, because even the changes in reimbursement rates for health care providers (which, as Peter notes, almost surely will evaporate in a very short period of time) are simply reductions in increases. In other words, spending will still grow, just not as fast as previously planned. In other words, the spending cuts are only cuts if you accept dishonest Washington terminology.
Something else that’s worth noting is that Obama pretends to embrace the Bowles-Simpson proposal, but we need to do some Clintonian parsing of what he actually said. The President carefully states that he wants to meet the “target that the Bowles-Simpson Commission established.” But that simply means a $4 trillion number, not the specifics of the Bowles-Simpson plan.
This is important because the Bowles-Simpson plan is a bad place to start, largely because it dramatically increases the double-tax burden on income that is saved and invested and it fails to include real entitlement reform.
Well, Obama clearly is signally that he wants to move this bad plan even further to the left, most notably with class-warfare increases in top tax rates, which is contrary to one of the few good features in the Bowles-Simpson plan.
If Obama is re-elected, GOPers should not get seduced into a phony budget summit that invariably would produce a bad plan. It’s not simply that I’m against higher taxes. It’s that I don’t want to give the clowns and crooks in Washington even more of our money when we won’t get any reforms that might justify that sacrifice.
It’s better to do nothing than it is to make a bad situation even worse.
[…] Even Leftists Won’t Defend Obama’s Make-Believe $4 Trillion “Grand Bargain” Budget Plan « I…. […]
Stop all tax withholdings. Make all earners write a monthly check for their taxes and watch people turn “conservative” overnight.
@Katherine
What a great idea!
Obama … the pied piper leading the lemmings to the cliff … mixed metaphors aside, the credibility that Obama has garnered from the American public and, more notably, the press is nothing short of amazing … When’s the Broadway musical coming out?
The democrats don’t need a budget. Nancy & Harry in charge first two years under Obama, vastly inflated budgets, baseline budgeting, continuing resolutions where all programs funded without review whether beneficial or not, no sunset clause. Bamo, home free, and you think the robot leftie voters understand all this? Our country has been had and we blithely saunter along believing the nonsense from the left.
Challenge! Address this stealth budgeting concept in an article and expose it for lack of merit.
How pathetic are our “leaders” that we cannot even go sideways for a year or two with our federal budget? At this point, I’d be happy to see the budget just stay at the same spending level for a couple years.
re: budgets that are so “laughably unserious”, he has been getting away with claiming for several months that “”I will use the money we’re no longer spending on war to pay down our debt and”. Here is a 1 minute cartoon&mashup of his own words making fun of that
and a few minute version that goes through why should care about his lies, and why the debt is a problem (I know you are more concerned about spending). If a CEO lied about his company’s finances like that to get people to buy stock the public would cry fraud!
Unfortunately these were just created for a new website, likely too late to spread before the election. The absurdity of the media letting him get away with this just needed a response. Some of your graphs were used (with links here) on the web page that goes along with it.
I didn’t expect the video to show up inline. It grabbed the long version, here is the 1 minute version which is more humor than details:
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