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Lucylastic -> RE: Remember when Obama said....... (2/14/2012 5:02:02 PM)
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Among the predictable Republican reactions to the President's proposed 2013 budget is the refrain that "Obama has failed to keep a 2009 promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term." Just days after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told a CPAC audience that President Obama "said he'd cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term," ABC's Jake Tapper dutifully announced "Obama's broken deficit promise." And today, the RNC debuted a new ad in which a supposedly betrayed voter warns, "President Obama, you broke your promise. I'll never forget that."
Of course, what everyone seems to be forgetting is that in 2004 President George W. Bush promised - and failed - to halve the federal budget deficit by 2009. As it turns out, Bush broke his pledge even before the economic cataclysm of 2008 that triggered the TARP bank bailout, sent government revenues plummeting, and required President Obama's rescue programs that saved the U.S. from "Greet Depression 2.0."
As he faced reelection in 2004, George W. Bush famously committed to cut the deficit in half by 2009. As it turned out, the budget Bush bequeathed to Barack Obama didn't even get close to that target. The FY 2009 budget Bush proposed in February 2008 called for a deficit of roughly $400 billion, almost identical to the result in 2004. But that January 2004 promise, as the Washington Post, CNN and The New York Times among others noted at the time, was premised upon two parallel frauds. As Perrspectives explained four years ago:
First, Bush's pompous prediction used as its baseline a wildly inflated White House deficit forecast of $521 billion, well above the CBO's estimate and the actual figure of $413 billion. More importantly,President Bush conveniently chose 2009 as his finish line, the year before his tax cuts were set to expire. Ma king them permanent (which he and all of the GOP presidential candidates endorse) would blow another $2.2 trillion hole in the federal budget by 2014.
(It's also worth noting, as the Obama administration has this week, that Bush's budget plans always understated the real deficit, because they routinely failed "to account for the costs of the wars in Afghanistan, the cost of preventing cuts to Medicare doctors, and the price of staving off an expansion of the alternative minimum tax.")
Even more information here...
http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/why-bush-and-obama-couldnt-keep-deficit-promises
http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/why-bush-and-obama-couldnt-keep-deficit-promises
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