Presidential Math: 10=12? [Economics And Math Not Fuzzy Enough]

Center for Fiscal Accountability ^ | 2011-04-18 | [Staff]

[92nina]

"...It’s fairly easy to see what’s going on here. The President decided on about $3 trillion of deficit reduction over 10 years, maybe a little less. He wanted to claim that he was “matching” the Ryan plan in deficit reduction, but was just achieving that same goal in a better way. Matching Republican deficit reduction is a lynchpin of the President’s fiscal argument. He was short by a trillion dollars or more, so he and his team decided to measure his proposal over a different timeframe and hope no one would notice. They lengthened the window by which they would measure the President’s deficit reduction until they matched the $4 trillion over 10 years in the Ryan plan and came up with 12 years."

Hennessey is also quick to point out that the President's plan, when actually measured against the Ryan Budget, is still fairly sparse on details. However, we can be fairly confident that the President envisions a budget that closely aligns with the recommendations of his Debt Commission, which has a very explicit bottom line:

$1.5 trillion in new taxes . No thanks, Mr. President.

[92nina]

Our friend from Chicago, Mr. Obama, is ripping the pages out of the old Clinton playbook. Someone should sue for theft and/or vandalism.

Take this article and others I found to the fight to the Libs on their own turf; put the Left on the defensive at at Digg and at Reddit and in Delicious and Stumbleupon

[library user]

They can play with numbers, such as talking about spending reductions—as yet largely unspecified—over 12 years.

As everyone who follows federal budget matters knows, budget outlooks come in 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year varieties.

So when President Obama mentioned 12 years in his speech last Wednesday, a lot of red-light political claptrap alerts started flashing.

This sort of statistical three-card monte works well enough with the Washington press corps and the New York Times editorial board, but it is working less and less with the economic press.

Source: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2706818/posts