On Monday, the Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee Sen. Jeff Sessions blasted President Barack Obama’s $3.8 trillion 2012 budget plan as being a fiscal charade of breathtaking proportions and “one of the most spectacular fiscal cover-ups in American history.”
According to Sen. Sessions, President Obama’s claim that his plan will achieve $4 trillion in deficit reduction over ten years is utter nonsense and that the actual figure, once stripped of accounting gimmicks, is actually a paltry $273 billion.
Under this plan, we will accumulate $11 trillion in new gross debt–the $4 trillion reduction in deficit is nowhere to be found.When the gimmicks are removed, spending even rises $1.5 trillion above current projections–$47 trillion in total. Annual spending will rise by 62 percent between 2011 and 2022. There are no real reforms and the new taxes are used to fund more wasteful Washington spending. So even with almost $2 trillion in job-crushing tax hikes, the president remains incapable of reducing the deficit–he just can’t resist the temptation to spend the money.
Sen. Session’s outrage at President Obama’s disingenuous budget, which would add $1.9 trillion in new taxes, comes on the heels of Obama Chief of Staff Jack Lew’s misleading assertion that the reason the Senate has failed to pass a budget resolution is because of Republican opposition. The Washington Post Fact-Checker gave that claim four Pinocchios for dishonesty and said Mr. Lew’s statement was comprised of “highly misleading language that blamed Republicans for the failure of the Democratic leadership.”
Speaking at a community college in northern Virginia Monday, President Obama championed his budget plan:
The time for self-inflicted wounds to our economy has to be over. Now’s the time for action. Now is the time for all of us to move forward.
In point of fact, one of the things preventing America from moving forward is the fact that Senate Democrats have not offered a budget plan of their own for the third straight year in a row.
It’s that kind of political chicanery, says Sen. Sessions, that makes President Obama’s 2012 budget so outrageous.
What makes matters even more atrocious is the use of accounting tricks to conceal these facts. For instance: the White House repeals $1.2 trillion in Budget Control Act cuts and doesn’t count it as new spending; they stop the planned cuts to Medicare providers without identifying any means to pay for it; they give themselves credit for discretionary caps that are already in law; and they pretend overseas spending will continue at higher levels so long-planned reductions in borrowing magically produce free money to spend somewhere else. The result is that the president has made no improvements to the debt course his own officials have described as unsustainable.
Most alarming of all is the fact that President Obama’s plan would increase the gross debt by roughly $11 trillion–a sum that’s in addition to the already $5 trillion debt bonanza Obama has already racked up in his first three years in office.
That, says Sen. Sessions, would place the United States of America on a “disastrous debt course” that would cement in place “unsustainable levels of government spending.”
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