President Barack Obama took aim at the “casual dishonesty” of Bush administration budgets Monday, saying he’ll abandon accounting “tricks” used to hide the ballooning deficit and pledging to cut a $1.3 trillion federal shortfall in half during his first term.
“I want to be very clear,” Obama said to open a “fiscal responsibility summit” at the White House. “We cannot and will not sustain deficits like these without end. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few years, we cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences to the next budget, the next administration and the next generation.”
In his brief remarks, Obama returned several times to criticism of past budget practices that clearly was aimed at President George W. Bush’s administration, suggesting the former president and his team weren’t candid with the American people about the scope of the budget difficulties.
At one point, Obama criticized “the casual dishonesty of hiding irresponsible spending with clever accounting tricks, the costly overruns, the fraud and abuse, the endless excuses. This is exactly what the American people rejected when they went to the polls. They sent us here to usher in a new era of responsibility in Washington, to start living within our means again and being straight with them about where their tax dollars are going.”
Obama also made clear that he believe he was inheriting the current budget mess from Bush – even though roughly a quarter of the $1.3 trillion deficit stems directly from Obama’s recently economic stimulus package.
Still, Obama said he would break from several of Bush’s practices in building his own 10-year budget being released Thursday. Obama said he would put the full cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on the budget, and allocate money for natural disasters – two things Bush did not do.
“We do ourselves no favors by hiding the truth about what we spend. In order to address our fiscal crisis, we have to be candid about its scope,” Obama said.
Failure to act quickly and decisively, Obama said, “we risk sinking into another crisis down the road, as…….our bills come due, confidence in our economy erodes and our children and grandchildren [suffer].”
The summit was designed to bring together congressional leaders from both parties along with outside interest groups and experts. One key goal of the summit to find ways to rein in spending on Medicaid and Medicare – which Obama’s budget director Peter Orszag said Monday was key to putting the nation’s economy back on track.
(Source: Politico)
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11 Responses
That’s not really a hiddush. Bush ran up massive deficits which set the stage for the collapse that began towards the end of his term (when the Democrats kindly offered to help share the blame).
In some ways, the period of 1994-2000 was ideal since one had a President and COngress who hated each other and were largely paralyzed – and paralysis on Capitol Hill does promote sound fiscal policy since it impairs spending.
Very slick. Hiding all his dishonest moves by attacking President Bush’s “Dishonesty.”
Reminds me of E-Mail viruses that I received, which warn me to “beware of viruses.”
We announces that he wants to cut $1.3 trillion federal deficit on the same day that he pledges hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinians. US citizens: Prepare to pay more taxes and less benefits, so you can finance Hamas!
No one can do a good job by getting involved. A small dot com bust and Bush is all over it, pushing stimulus packages, lowering taxes, urging the cost of borrowing down. We might have still survived that if he wasn’t spending so much newly printed money in Iraqistan at the same time. But Kibud Av is important, and Bush is a religious man. Well, the rampant inflation that came from printing all that money and the low interest rates were instrumental in bringing on the current crisis. Of course, the administration’s response was to push more stimulus and tax cuts. But no matter how low cost of capital gets, you can’t repay it by giving away money.
When we finally realized that the inflation was starting to make the dollar look like Zimbabwe’s currency, we began to cut up little dollar bills into ticker tape. This way we get back to where we were before all that extra money was printed. Too bad if that causes deflation. We can’t have the M3 increase too quickly. Unfortunately, deflation has some pretty bad consequences, not the least of which is the devastation that it causes to the stock market. But hey! no one can remember that the whole excuse for this mess was that we were trying to stimulate a small bust back in 2000. The short memory of homo sapiens combined with the inability to connect the dots means that we don’t analyze, we only act.
So here comes some more spending designed to bring us out of the mess that was not stopped by earlier spending. But everyone deserves the chance to make his own mistakes instead of learning them from others.
If he were such a fan of Abraham Lincoln as he claims (instead of just saying that for appearances), he might know a saying that is attributed to him: “Learn from the mistakes of others. Because you will not live long enough to make them all yourself.”
#s 2 and 3 – Eat your hearts out Deep Thinker and Squeek. Here’s what most people think, according to polling released tonight:
“President Obama is benefiting from remarkably high levels of optimism and confidence among Americans about his leadership, providing him with substantial political clout as he confronts the nation’s economic challenges and opposition from nearly all Republicans in Congress, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.A majority of people surveyed in both parties said Mr. Obama was striving to work in a bipartisan way, but most Americans faulted Republicans for their response to the president, saying the party had objected to the $787 billion economic stimulus plan for political reasons. Most Americans said Mr. Obama should pursue the priorities he campaigned on, the poll found, rather than seek middle ground with Republicans”
Dear Mr. President,
Why is is that you are blaming the previous administration for your problems? Was the previous administration the one to sign that Pork Bill last week? In only FOUR weeks you have added TRILLIONS of dollars to the budget yet you have the chutzpa to place blame elsewhere.
You got up in front of this people of this nation and said there was no pork in this “stimulus” bill when in fact it was mostly full of pork. That, Mr. President, WAS dishonest and we the people will hold you to that at the next election.
Spreading the wealth is NOT an American concept and your plant might be working now, but in the long run we can only hope and pray the people of this country see it for what it is – SOCIALISM.
I wish your administration success however our definition of “success” is different and I hope it is more like my meaning than yours.
ML
#5, what you are saying just proves my point about the lack of ability in most humans to rationalize and analyze before acting or speaking.
#7, Nothing proved your point. You merely disagree and offer no alternative. The only post proving your point is #7.
# 6 – Mark Levin: In all due respect, sir, you are out of your mind.
First of all, have you any concept of the budget deficits that were run up under the prior administration? According to CNN a record $482 billion deficit is predicted this year alone, due largely to policies under the Bush administration – and this is even before you address budget shananigans such as finacing the Iraq War off budget.
Secondly, you need to read up on how New Deal deficit spending on public works revitalized portions of the economy in the 1930s. Many people fear the stimulus package may not be large enough.
All you conservative has-beens can come up with is the ideological mantra of tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. Look where that has gotten us today – Yuch
Shkoyach Squeak – you say in #7, addressing my submission in 5, “…what you are saying just proves my point about the lack of ability in most humans to rationalize and analyze before acting or speaking…” 24 words with not an ounce of substantive content. Purim Torah?
Are you guys serious? You two are prime examples – you are so blinded by whatever it is you are eating that you are unable to think in any other terms.
The guy (Bush) dug us into a hole with his decisions, but no one seems to remember what problems led to those decisions, as I elucidated in my post. Now your guy is continuing the same damaging policies. The fact that people are saying what you quoted in #5 just shows that they can’t connect the dots.
I’ll let you have the last word here, because I already know what you will reply (it’s like arguing with a wall) but at least do me the courtesy of reading my post before replying. You have no idea what I wrote, clearly.
P.S. I have no doubt that the New Deal would not have done much good had it not been for WWII. Keynes, schmeynes.