President Barack Obama is repeating a debunked claim regarding his
commitment to deficit reduction, one of the highest priority issues for
voters this election cycle.
In a campaign video unveiled Wednesday, the president called for a “new economic patriotism” and touted his “balanced plan to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade.”
The claim that Obama has a plan—in the form of his most recent budget proposal—to reduce the federal deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years has been a constant refrain from the president on the campaign trail, and has been echoed by his Democratic allies.
Former President Bill Clinton, for example, praised Obama’s “reasonable plan of $4 trillion in debt reduction over a decade” during his primetime speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C.
However, as Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s in-house fact-checker, has made clear: “The repeated claim that Obama’s budget reduces the deficit by $4 trillion is simply not accurate.”
“Virtually no serious budget analyst agreed” with the Obama administration’s accounting with respect to the $4 trillion figure, Kessler found.
Independent experts panned the president’s budget for its “troubling” reliance on gimmicks and accounting tricks to inflate the magnitude of the savings being proposed.
Keith Hennessey, a former director of the National Economic Council, estimated the true value of Obama’s deficit reduction—minus these gimmicks—to be about $2.8 trillion, and called even that reduced figure a “generous” assessment.
Read more: http://freebeacon.com/phantom-savings/
In a campaign video unveiled Wednesday, the president called for a “new economic patriotism” and touted his “balanced plan to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade.”
The claim that Obama has a plan—in the form of his most recent budget proposal—to reduce the federal deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years has been a constant refrain from the president on the campaign trail, and has been echoed by his Democratic allies.
Former President Bill Clinton, for example, praised Obama’s “reasonable plan of $4 trillion in debt reduction over a decade” during his primetime speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C.
However, as Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s in-house fact-checker, has made clear: “The repeated claim that Obama’s budget reduces the deficit by $4 trillion is simply not accurate.”
“Virtually no serious budget analyst agreed” with the Obama administration’s accounting with respect to the $4 trillion figure, Kessler found.
Independent experts panned the president’s budget for its “troubling” reliance on gimmicks and accounting tricks to inflate the magnitude of the savings being proposed.
Keith Hennessey, a former director of the National Economic Council, estimated the true value of Obama’s deficit reduction—minus these gimmicks—to be about $2.8 trillion, and called even that reduced figure a “generous” assessment.
Read more: http://freebeacon.com/phantom-savings/
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