Obama's Agenda Not Real Cause of Deficit (Title on Yahoo)

NYT via Yahoo ^ | June 10, 2009 | David Leonhardt

[Hildy]

For U.S., a Sea of Perilous Red Ink, Years in the Making

There are two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years.

The first is that President Obama’s agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested.

The New York Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II. This debt will constrain the country’s choices for years and could end up doing serious economic damage if foreign lenders become unwilling to finance it.

Mr. Obama — responding to recent signs of skittishness among those lenders — met with 40 members of Congress at the White House on Tuesday and called for the re-enactment of pay-as-you-go rules, requiring Congress to pay for any new programs it passes.

The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years.

[Hildy]

The title you see above was the headline on my Yahoo News Homepage tonight. UNFREAKINGBELIEVABLE. I have to say that I have NEVER, NOT ONCE, seen anything that could be construed as even a tad negative towards Obama on that Page. It's positively scary.

[2ndDivisionVet]

No, it’s the White House and Treasury faries fault!

[Darkwolf377]

The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012.

That's really all they should be printing, if they were honest--"AP Analysis: It's not Clinton or Obama's fault!"

[PugetSoundSoldier]

Doesn't add up... The FY2007 budget (the last GOP/Bush budget) had a $162 billion deficit - and that was down from ~$240 the previous year, which was down from ~$400 billion the year before that. We were on a path to lower deficits, and in fact if the GOP retained Congress, the budget deficit would have dropped below $100 billion.

But the Pelosi/Obama/Reid triumvirate took over, and blew the deficit to $440 billion. And then we get this year's porkfest of $2 trillion. A budget that was written by the Democrats, passed with the assistance of Obama, and then signed into law not by President Bush but by President Obama!

How that means Obama didn't create the deficits just boggles the mind!

The numbers don't lie!

[Nateman]

Tell a lie often enough and a bunch of fools are going to believe it. I was censored by Yahoo during the Clinton years. They would not list my web page in their results. Not only that but when I managed to get some attention on another web site he was threatened with legal action so he shut it down.

[PugetSoundSoldier]

[Always Right]

The mental gymnastics required to make such a twisted claim should get you an olympic gold metal.

[rvoitier]

Bush's deficits ran @ 2% GDP. Obama is planning 4% deficits of GDP under rosy circumstances.

Obama's lowest defict is going to be $200 Billion larger than Bush's highest.
Think about that.

[CutePuppy]

Technically, the headline is accurate: Obama's Agenda Not Real Cause of Deficit, because the deficits have been there before Obama.

However, much more true and accurate would be the headline: Obama's Agenda Not Real Cause of Deficit... It's The Real Cause of Vastly Bigger Deficit Than It Should Have Been, Could Have Been And That Many Obama Voters Expected It Would Be"

I guess, it's just too long a headline.

[CutePuppy]

>i>The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012.

These were projections made by CBO just as we were entering or going through the Clinton recession, and which relied almost exclusively on capital gain taxes projecting that market would be delivering between 15% and 20% annual returns just as the market was sliding from its post-bubble peak. Static accounting at its worst!

I remember the semiannual Congressional Fed hearings and discussions about what to do with $Trillion$ of projected government surpluses, and thought - if that alone doesn't tell you that it's the peak of the market and the economy, I don't know what would.

[CutePuppy]

The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012.

These were projections made by CBO just as we were entering or going through the Clinton recession, and which relied almost exclusively on capital gain taxes projecting that market would be delivering between 15% and 20% annual returns just as the market was sliding from its post-bubble peak. Static accounting at its worst!

I remember the semiannual Congressional Fed hearings and discussions about what to do with $Trillion$ of projected government surpluses, and thought - if that alone doesn't tell you that it's the peak of the market and the economy, I don't know what would.

[PressurePoint]

I have to say that I have NEVER, NOT ONCE, seen anything that could be construed as even a tad negative towards Obama on that Page

I wrote Yahoo! to complain about the "featured stories" bias toward Obama a few months back.
I actually got a reply back claiming that the featured news stories are randomly selected from all news stories available by an "aggregator" and no human decision-making or political agenda goes into the choice.
I was further instructed that "Yahoo! does not write the stories," so if I have a complaint about the content I should go to the source.

I wrote back my disbelief that a multi-million dollar business like Yahoo! would trust the most visible face of their brand to the vagaries of random selection?

Their reply to that was a perfunctory "thanks for the feedback"

[PressurePoint]

Obama’s agenda ... is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits,...

...the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been...

This is a clever manipulation of the readers to confuse debt with deficit.

The deficit has to be Obama's since he's the one who submitted and signed the budget.

The debt may not be entirely Obama's fault, but 100% of it is due to entitlement and social "insurance" obligations that democrats put into place and are politically impossible to eliminate.

[Recovering_Democrat]

The media LIES. They worship HUSSEIN.

[ReleaseTheHounds]

And of course Mr. Leonhardt doesn’t comment on how President Bush twice tried to address Social Security and Medicare (at the beginning of his two terms in office) only to have the Dems ignore the efforts, contribute nothing to the discussion and kick the can down the road (a favorite activity adopted from the Clinton Administration).

And I bet Mr. Leonhardt buys the CBO’s forecasts, and the forecasts used in the Treasury stress test (unemployment will peak at 8.0%). These people are Orwellian.

[Incorrigible]

Bump