Sunday, February 22, 2009

Obama vows to cut huge deficit in half

Politico.com reported President Obama will announce Monday that he plans to cut the nation’s projected annual deficit in half by the end of his first term, a senior administration official said Saturday.
He quadruples the budget with his obscene stimulus bills that don't stimulate anything but left wing interest groups and Democratic campaign coffers, then cuts it in half by the end of his term, and he hopes people will not notice that he doubled it.
The plan will make explicit what Obama officials have been suggesting for months: Contrary to his campaign promise, Obama will allow the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans expire as scheduled at the end of 2010 instead of seeking their repeal sooner. Officials determined that seeking to raise the taxes earlier during a recession was a bad idea, advisers said.
But wat if the recession is still going on when they expire at the end of 2010. Will he extend them to prevent an automatic tax increase in a recession?
Obama, who will speak Monday to a Fiscal Responsibility Summit at the White House, also will outline steps he is taking to eliminate what his staff calls “accounting gimmicks” used by previous administrations.
And introduce new ones.
“This budget actually is going to assume that there will be a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, flood or manmade disaster in the United States in fiscal year 2010, and each year going forward 10 years,” the official said. “The Bush budget never assumed that.”
I am sure there will be some. But can you predict how many, and of what magnitude so that you can budget for them. Or are you going to budget a certain amount, which must be spread over whatever happens.
Under White House projections, this year’s inherited budget deficit of $1.3 trillion will be cut to $533 billion by fiscal year 2013, the end of the first term.
Are the Stimulus Bills and other such wasteful spending to be included in the budget?
“So we’ll cut it at least in half,” the official said. That represents a decrease from 9.2 percent of the gross domestic product, a measure of the nation’s output, to 3 percent, the administration estimates. The official said the bulk of the savings come from winding down the war in Iraq, additional revenue from raising taxes on the wealthy, and other cuts and savings to be specified later. Officials have said the budget creates room to start an ambitious overhaul of the nation's health-care system,
Which unlike the war in Iraq, will never end.
which Obama aides view as a key to the government's fiscal future.
But what about our future, and the future of our children and grandchildren, that are going to have to pay for today's wasteful spending.
Obama said in his weekly address on Saturday that a budget blueprint he is releasing Thursday will be “honest in its accounting.”
And dishonest in every other way.

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