NYC Letter: Lies The President Told Me, Part IX -- Spending The Debt Pay-Down

Day 1,284 of CHOPE
D-minus 172 Days

Here is Mr. Obama.

I sent [Congress] a plan that would have reduced the deficit by $4 trillion in a way that is balanced -- that pays for the job-creating investments we need by cutting unnecessary spending, but also by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes.

Mr. Obama,
pretending to reduce the deficit by hiking taxes
REMARKS ON VETERANS JOBS
GOLDEN VALLEY, Minnesota June 1, 2012 (White House)

Here we are.

We are not rich. Mr. Buffet is. We are against raising taxes. Mr. Buffett isn't. Why the topsy-turvy? Because, dear government honeypot, when taxes are raised to increase revenues, those revenues do not go toward paying down debt. They do not shore up fiscal prudence. They are spent before they are collected and used to leverage yet more spending.

Posted by Damian at August 29, 2011 11:45 PM

Balanced debt pay-down or pretense for more spending, which is it?

HOW BARACK OBAMA
"PAYS DOWN THE DEBT"

July 27, 2012 (Powerline) - [I]t would be hard to find another politician as dishonest as Barack Obama. Currently, he is running an ad that says he has a plan to "pay down the debt in a balanced way". He also tries to justify his call for a tax increase on the ground that the increased revenues will reduce the deficit.

But where, exactly, is Obama’s plan to "pay down the debt"? It is a figment of his imagination; or, rather, a convenient lie that he thinks will help him politically. The only plan Obama has authored is a budget so outrageous that no one–not one Republican, not one Democrat, in either the House or the Senate–will vote for it. Today Obama complied belatedly with federal law by submitting his mid-year budget update, which is required to be submitted to Congress every year no later than July 16. So, does Obama’s updated budget finally disclose his "balanced plan to pay down the deficit"? Of course not. Like every other budget Obama has proposed, it would leave America deeper in the hole than ever. Senator Jeff Sessions said today:

President Obama is currently running a campaign ad saying he has a plan to 'pay down the debt in a balanced way'. He has made this claim in public remarks as well. But his updated budget—submitted two weeks after the legal deadline—reveals just how dramatically false this claim is. These ads ought to be pulled down.

His updated budget proposes a $10.6 trillion increase in gross debt through 2022, with debt remaining permanently above 100 percent of GDP. The picture in the out-years looks even bleaker. No change is proposed to our dangerously unsustainable debt course.

The President’s claim his tax hikes are for deficit reduction is shown to be false as well. His budget proposes to spend $46.2 trillion over ten years—an increase of nearly one-and-half trillion dollars above the current law baseline and a 57 percent increase above today’s spending levels. The President’s $1.8 trillion tax increase is not used to reduce the deficit but to fund this massive increase above what we are currently planning to spend.

Meanwhile, the President’s party in the Senate has refused to even produce a budget plan at all for three straight years.

Mr. Obama, an inexperienced politician elected to the highest office in the land, simply doesn't understand budgetry. He doesn't understand the enormities of national finance (and here). He put together a budget team that can't read a spreadsheet, doesn't understand arithmetic, and lies shamelessly for the boss.

Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we're not adding to the debt anymore; we're spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt.

Jack Lew,
OMB director, characterizing the salutary
outcomes of Mr. Obama's 2012 budget*
STATE OF THE UNION INTERVIEW
WASHINGTON February 13, 2011 (CNN)

Debt never comes due for Mr. Obama. That's bitter medicine for some future president to swallow -- preferably a Republican president -- forced by inescapable necessity to stop spending money the government doesn't have, that the economy can't produce pari passu, and ultimately beyond what politicians can confiscate from the citizenry.

Mr. Obama is focused on the important business of the nation, getting himself re-elected.

Well, I mean, we're out of money now.

Mr. Obama,
Spender-in-chief, giving an account
of his administration's spending
INTERVIEW May 23, 2009 (C-Span)

CHOPE.

He can't lie fast enough.

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* The Democrat Senate unanimously voted down Mr. Obama's budget, 97-0.