Barack Obama is a documented liar so many times over it’s positively unreal. But it’s not merely the sheer galling number of his lies, it’s the magnitude of importance of the things he lied about, that most undermines America.
Sometimes a video is worth a thousand words:
WASHINGTON – The Republican National Committee (RNC) released a new web video “Empty Promises: Debt and Deficits” demonstrating President Obama’s repeated broken promises when it comes to spending. Barack Obama promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term but has run trillion dollar deficits every year since. Now, as he’s campaigning for a second term, he’s making the same empty promises he made four years ago.
Web video can be viewed here.
Download the web video here.
“President Obama has broken his promise over and over when it comes to reining in Washington’s out of control spending,” said RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. “During the campaign, he lambasted the growing debt and, once elected, he pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.
“Yet, President Obama’s record has been to double-down on Washington’s out of control spending by running trillion dollar deficits every year he’s been in office. His serial disregard of the nation’s finances is mortgaging our children’s future, guaranteeing that the next generation will not be better off.
“Barack Obama is right–the American people are tired of politicians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk when it comes to fiscal responsibility. After four years of lip-service on spending, it is clear that Barack Obama is just a typical politician, saying one thing to get elected and doing another once in office.”
Speaker of the House John Boehner provided many of the details in print:
In his first speech to a joint session of Congress in 2009, President Obama promised to “cut the deficit in half” by the end of his first term. As the Associated Press said at that time: “In calling for a deficit of about $530 billion in four years, [President] Obama has established a marker by which to measure his first-term performance as president. The dollar figure could be his albatross or his badge of success.” Three years and three trillion-dollar deficits later, it’s clear that President Obama will not be brandishing any badges at this year’s State of the Union Address. Here’s more on President Obama’s broken promise to rein in the deficit:
- The President’s Budget, Released Last Year, Projected a Deficit of $1.1 Trillion for 2012. (Office of Management and Budget, Accessed 1/22/12)
- President Obama and Washington Democrats Have Run the Three Largest Deficits in U.S. History:
FY2009 Deficit: $1.413 Trillion, the Highest in U.S. History. (Congressional Budget Office, 11/7/11)
FY2011 Deficit: $1.299 Trillion, the Second Highest in U.S. History. (Congressional Budget Office, 11/7/11)
FY2010 Deficit: $1.294 Trillion, the Third Highest in U.S. History. (Congressional Budget Office, 11/7/11)
- President Obama Has Added More Than $4.6 Trillion to the Debt Since Taking Office. (U.S. Treasury Department, Accessed 1/22/12)
- The Nation’s Debt Has Now Eclipsed the Size of the Entire U.S. Economy. (Bureau of Economic Analysis, 12/22/11; U.S. Treasury Department, Accessed 1/22/12)
Far from fulfilling his promise to the American people, President Obama – aided by Democrats in Congress – has engaged in a reckless spending spree that is damaging the economy and making it harder to create private-sector jobs. Instead of putting forth a serious, credible plan to cut spending and address the major drivers of our debt, President Obama punted – offering a budget last year that failed by a vote of 97-0 in the Senate.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday earlier this week, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) reaffirmed Republicans’ commitment to “real reform of our entitlement programs and real controls on spending here in Washington.” Republicans, led by Speaker Boehner, tried to work with the president to enact a major deficit reduction law — including new revenues, through tax reform with lower rates for all — but the president insisted on job-killing tax hikes on small businesses, opposed real spending cuts, and declined to support reforms to strengthen entitlement programs. House Republicans have led where President Obama has failed, and it is now up to Senate Democrats to do their job and pass a budget for the first time in 1,000 days. The American people “can’t wait” another three years for an economy that creates jobs, and a government that fulfills its “most basic responsibility of governing,” and they shouldn’t have to.
This issue is coming back again like a boomerang due to Obama’s failed leadership. Because the same man who demonized George Bush as being “un-American” and a “failed leader” for trying to pass a debt ceiling extension – and then VOTING AGAINST FUNDING THE GOVERNMENT – is demanding a FOURTH debt ceiling extension himself after his last three were the highest in the history of the human race.
Obama’s budgets are so bloated and so bad and frankly so vile that NOT EVEN ONE SINGLE DEMOCRAT WILL DRINK HIS CYANIDE KOOLAID BUDGETS. And the Democrat-controlled Senate just proved that yet again by voting 99-0 against Obama’s demon-possessed budget.
The only thing Obama knows how to do is campaign. Which is why he’s already had more fundraisers than the last five presidents – three of whom served for two full terms – COMBINED.
Tags: budget, budget deficits, Obama promised to cut the defict in half, trillion dollars
Start Thinking Right 
May 18, 2012 at 5:25 pm
Michael, I know you are busy, but what do you think of this. A dem friend posted it. Feel free to pick it apart. Your help is appreciated.
May 19, 2012 at 4:45 pm
Goldni,
I actually only bothered to watch the first half of it. As you said, I DON’T have time to waste, but I also had already seen all I needed to see by then.
First of all, this video gets ALL of its sources from a leftwing think tank called “Think Progress.” These are not official figures; they are not CBO or GAO figures; they are leftist figures. If your friend is willing to stipulate that Heritage or any right wing source you choose is as credible, then you can simply throw your own numbers at him and win that way. If he doesn’t agree to that, then the obvious question is why should you agree to his cooked statistics? That said…
The idiot on this video begins by referencing budget deficits, comparing Clinton’s to Bush’s as if somehow that would mitigate Obama’s. That would be bad enough, given that Clinton governed as an “the era of big government is over” moderate whereas Obama is governing as a raging liberal and the two presidencies are completely different. But the sheer bogusness of the comparison doesn’t end there; BECAUSE DEMOCRATS HAVEN’T PASSED A DAMN BUDGET IN GOING ON FOUR FREAKING YEARS!!! And JUST HOW THE HELL CAN YOU TALK ABOUT OBAMA’S BUDGET DEFICITS WHEN HIS PARTY HAS BEEN SO UTTERLY IRRESPONSIBLE THAT IT HASN’T OFFERED A DAMN BUDGET IN NOW 1,118 DAYS!!!???
So just to MENTION budget deficits is a mocking and criminal indictment of the piss-poor God damn America failure of leadership of the Obama administration and the reckless demon-possessed criminal irresponsibility of the Democrat Party. How DARE this clown talk about budget deficits when AT LEAST THE REPUBLICANS ACTUALLY BOTHERED TO DO THEIR MINIMUM DUTY AS LEGISLATORS AND PASS A DAMN BUDGET.
But as laughably bad as the whole mention of a “budget” makes Obama look, it actually gets even WORSE for him. Because in not bothering to pass a damn budget in nearly four years, the Democrats have utterly and completely rejected OBAMA’S miserable excuse for “budgets” too. So much so that last year his budget was voted down 0-97 in his own Democrat-controlled Senate. And this year his demoniac budget was rejected first by the House (where it went down 0-414 without ONE SINGLE DEMOCRAT SAYING, “THIS IS SANE…”) and then Obama’s “budget” just got rejectd 0-99 AGAIN BY HIS OWN DEMOCRAT-CONTROLLED SENATE!!!
So if a Democrat wants to talk about budget deficits, fine: so long as I get to take a homerun swing at his face with a baseball bat every freaking time he does it to keep pointing out what an abject hypocrite and disgrace to the cockroach species he is.
This video clown wants to talk facts, let’s talk FACTS.
The national debt when Bush took office was nearly $6 trillion ($5.78 trillion); when Bush left it was over $10 trillion. That is after eight years. That’s bad, no question. BUT THAT SAME NATIONAL DEBT UNDER OBAMA IS NEARLY SIXTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS!!!! George Bush gave us over $4 trillion in debt – and Barack Obama demonized him for it:
And:
What’s the national debt now after three and a half years of Obama??? See for yourself. It is $15.7 trillion dollars and it will easily be $16 trillion by the time Obama ends his first term. If you just do some very simple math, based on the readily available national debt numbers, Obama is spending three times as much as Bush.
And so what this guy on your video is doing is saying don’t look at the actual record from the official numbers; look over here at the radical leftist Think Progress statistics instead.
You can see what Obama did to spending in one scary picture.
The clown on the video presents Bush as having had a $282 billion budget surplus when he assumed office. And Obama started out with a $1.2 trillion deficit when he assumed office. I won’t quibble with those (I frankly don’t recall the numbers, but they’re probably ball park). But let’s look at a few underlying things.
Let’s start with what Bush actually inherited – because this $282 billion surplus very certainly does NOT give you the actual story of what Bush inherited:
Have you ever heard of the Dotcom collapse? America lost over $7.1 TRILLION in wealth that was just vaporized; and the Nasdaq valuation saw 78% of its portfolio wiped out as a result of a giant recession that Bill Clinton handed to George Bush. There is ZERO question that the Dotcom bubble collapse happened on Clinton’s watch – and it fully blew up just as Bush took over. So Bill Clinton got all the “on-paper” benefits produced by the tech explosion; and Clinton gave Bush a sea of red ink to pay for it. Did you know that?
What if the 2008 economic collapse hadn’t happened until just after Obama took office? Would Democrats have agreed that it was all Obama’s fault? If you think so you’re an idiot. But that’s exactly what they’re trying to do here: blame Bush for something that had clearly developed during the Clinton presidency.
But it’s actually even worse than that.
The only reason we don’t tend to talk about the Dotcom bubble collapse more is because a frankly even MORE enormous event occurred: the 9/11 attack that occurred shortly after Bush took office. Every single terrorist who was going to attack us on 9/11/01 came into the country and received training BEFORE Clinton left office. All of the preparation for the attack occurred on Clinton’s watch except for the actual attack itself.
Why did we get attacked on 9/11? Let’s find out in the words of the man who attacked us after Bill Clinton’s abject fiasco commonly known as Black Hawk Down in Somalia:
Our military was weak as a result of Clinton’s cuts. How about our intelligence that is tasked with seeing an attack coming??? Clinton gutted that too:
The 9/11 attack was the result of the joke that the military had become as a result of a Bill Clinton who gutted the military budget. Bush I took Reagan’s mantle and won the Cold War and defeated the Soviet-armed Iraqi regime; Bill Clinton tore that great, powerful military apart. And we paid dearly for it. And every single penny that Clinton saved by dismantling our military and our intelligence Bush had to pay a thousandfold.
So right from the start, if a Democrat wants to say Clinton had a surplus, YOU SHOVE THAT SURPLUS UP THEIR BUTTS BY POINTING OUT WHERE IT CAME FROM AND WHAT IT RESULTED IN. It came from weakening the military and our intelligence apparatus and it resulted in the horror of 9/11 and the wars that necessarily followed.
But let’s go further. I’m just getting started. Let’s find out why we ever got to a budget surplus during the Clinton years. I point out a lot of it in this article (and see also here). That’s where I document and further explain these facts. Clinton got his ass handed to him in 1994 – the biggest Republican landslide in history. Both the House and the Senate went Republican and after the disaster of the first two Clinton years the remaining six were under a Republican Congress. That’s when Bill Clinton cowed to the Republicans and said, “The era of big government is over.” That is a REPUBLICAN line and it is a refuation of the DEMOCRAT line.
“The Republican Revolution” that OWNED Bill Clinton in 1994 had something called “the Contract with America.” Anyone rememmber that? The VERY FIRST PLATFORM called for a balanced budget. And when you consider the fact that Bill Clinton was FORCED to cut spending and balance the budget by Republicans (see my article for evidence), and when you consider that it is CONGRESS that controls spending according to the Constitution and the separation of powers, it is only doctrinaire liberal ideologues who give Bill Clinton credit for balancing the budget. IT WAS REPUBLICANS WHO CONTROLLED THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE WHO BALANCED THE BUDGET – AND THEY FOUGHT CLINTON TOOTH AND NAIL TO DO IT.
So who should get credit for the balanced budget THAT A REPUBLICAN HOUSE AND A REPUBLICAN SENATE PASSED ON TO THE FUTURE? NOT BILL CLINTON!!!! And what was the state of the economy in 2001 as Bush was taking over? Pretty damn awful. And what happened just after Bush took over on 9/11 that gutted our economy as air travel, etc. went to crap??? A massive attack that was the result of Bill Clinton emboldening Osama bin Laden, gutting the military, gutting the intelligence that would have prevented such an attack, that’s what.
Now let’s look at some of the interesting events that occurred under Bush.
As I point out in this article, the Republican majority House passed its final budget in 2006 for FY-2007. It had a budget deficit of $161 billion. Unemployment was at 4.6 percent. But Democrats successfully demonized Bush for the Iraq War and for Hurricane Katrina and Democrats took over the House and the Senate in January 2007. And guess what happened to spending? And remember it is CONGRESS that controlls spending! That’s right, the Democrats’ first budget for FY-2008 had a budget deficit of $459 billion – NEARLY THREE TIMES THE DEFICIT OF THE REPUBLICANS. Three times the spending: that should sound familiar.
It was UNDER DEMOCRAT CONTROL that the next budget for FY-2009 had the deficit that is being demonized by the video. Btw, half of the TARP funds that Bush pushed through Congress went to Obama. It was all on Bush’s deficit, but OBAMA SPENT HALF THE MONEY.
The fiscal year 2010 budget – AGAIN, UNDER DEMOCRAT CONTROL – was $1.6 TRILLION. Why does George Bush get blamed for the out-of-control budgets of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid??? For the same reason that Bill Clinton got all the credit for the work of the Republican-controlled House and Senate that FORCED Slick Willie to cut spending and balance the budget: naked propaganda and bias and hypocrisy.
The clown in your video says, “Can you believe Obama has got us in a $1.3 or $1.4 trillion defit? Yeah, given that Bush and the Republicans handed him (Obama) a $1.2 trillion defict and a horrible recession.” And again, I believe I documented which party’s CONGRESS spent that. It is a matter of fact that the last deficit passed by Republicans contained a tenth the amount of deficit/debt that is being cited. But then the fool proceeds to have a chart – again, not from the GAO but from THINK PROGRESS – that purports to say that “federal spending, taxes and deficits all lower as a percent of GDP than when Obama took office – again the source being Think Progress.
That chart is totally bunk, and all we have to do is consider the fact that US DEBT JUST EXCEEDED 100% OF US GDP FOR THE FIRST TIME BASICALLY SINCE WORLD WAR II. That event did NOT occur under Bush and in fact NEVER occurred under Bush. So just what the hell are these people claiming??? It is an abject lie.
The fool on your video is talking about “the facts” when the facts refute him:
So this idiot in your video is stating something as a fact using a leftist source as documentation that is simply blatantly refuted by history.
And it wasn’t long after that that I lost interest. I would rather fill my head with fairy tales than outright propaganda.
I could say a lot more, but that’s enough for now.
You are responding to an article in which I document that Barack Obama made a promise. He promised the American people he would cut the deficit by half by now. I document that Barack Obama is a liar. He didn’t cut the deficit in half; he never even TRIED to cut the deficit. INSTEAD HE EXPLODED SPENDING. Those are just facts.
And this turd on this video is saying, “Don’t consider that. Look over here at what Think Progress says.”
Bullcrap.
May 19, 2012 at 7:02 pm
Yeah I only made it through half of it too. We have a long row to hoe my friend. We have an uphill climb for sure. God help us! Your musings have been invaluable for me arguing on message boards and Google Plus. You and Andrew Wilkow are two of the best afa economic facts etc.
Thanks again for your time and trouble. Keep up your good work!
May 20, 2012 at 1:04 pm
Goldni,
I’m going to go ahead and turn this example of liberal “thought” into an article, so I thought of a little more to say.
I went ahead and inserted this part of my rant into my initial response to you for the sake of continuity, but this is what I added:
It occurred to me how beyond laughable it actually is for Democrats to talk about “budget deficits” with a straight face given the fact that THEY HAVEN’T BOTHERED TO EVEN PRODUCE A BUDGET IN FOUR YEARS.
It’s rather analogous to an insane sonofabitch who drives crapfaced drunk down the freeway at 140mph every day criticizing the little old lady for driving 2mph over the posted speed limit. It’s just that insane.
May 20, 2012 at 2:05 pm
Michael,
LOL..I’m glad I’m not the only one whose ire gets ahem elevated when dealing with these idiots.
I also correctly pointed out that the $281 billion Clinton surplus was pure 100% fiction. Even Clinton’s own people later admitted the Clinton surpluses beyond 2001 were an illusion created by tremendously optimistic assumptions by the CBO. Tax receipts exploded in 1998, 1999, and 2000 as a result of the stock market bubble and the resulting dramatic rise in capital gains taxes. CBO projected that such increases would continue for the next ten years resulting in surpluses as far as the eye can see. But when the bubble began to burst in March 2000, and the economy receded twelve months later, CBO clung to the expectation that these revenues were still going to materialize.
As CEPR noted in its report, it wasn’t until January 2003 that CBO realized its error and began seriously revising down its revenue targets and up its deficit projections. So the Clinton surplus that mean ole W Bush destroyed by giving tax cuts to the evil rich, was ultimately shown to be a complete fable.
May 21, 2012 at 2:26 pm
Goldni,
You learn something every day. I hadn’t heard that the “Clinton surplus” (so-called because the liberal media love giving Democrats credit for everything that can be called good news) was largely a fiction of overly optimistic predictions.
The CBO rarely EVER gets any of its budget predictions right. They are almost ALWAYS way off.
I’ll look more into that. If you’ve got a good link please send it.
There was also an issue with Clinton on playing with public debt versus intra-governmental holdings. And that same article points out that “mysteriously,” the national debt somehow went up every year of the Clinton presidency – and just how the hell could THAT happen if Clinton actually created a surplus???
May 21, 2012 at 6:14 pm
Michael,
Yep, regardless of what democrat shills have been saying for the last decade, the Bush tax cuts didn’t turn surpluses into deficits. It was instead a mixture of terrible forecasting by CBO, a plummeting stock market with a resulting decline in capital gains taxes, and a recession caused by a bear market that began ten months before Bush was inaugurated
May 22, 2012 at 3:01 pm
Goldni,
The Bush tax cuts CLEARLY didn’t turn surpluses into deficits; THEY GENERATED INCREASED REVENUES. Blaming the Bush tax cuts for deficits is the same thing as blaming your promotion and big raise on your debts.
The problem – along with a CBO that is required to operate on whatever assumptions are handed to it and spit out a number – is SPENDING.
That last about the CBO is a real issue. If I as a congressman tell the CBO that I can spit gold out of my butt, they’ll ask how much gold per how time time and factor that in to their budget calculations. They actually have to do that; that was how the Democrats were able to get such ridiculous budget estimates from ObamaCare. So if the congressional leadership says the economy will grow at a rate of 25 percent, no matter how crazy it is CBO will calculate a budget with 25 percent growth. And I say that to take some of the blame away from CBO as an entity that is simply forced to spit out numbers that have nothing to do with reality.
Obviously, we need to cut our spending commensurate with our ability to pay for things. But Democrats will do everything they can to prevent that from happening and demonize every single attempt to rein in spending.