President Obama’s Deficit Speech

Apr 15

President Obama’s Deficit Speech

I found the transcript for Obama’s deficit speech. You can read it here.

Interesting snippets:

…after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program—but we didn’t pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts—tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

…by the time I took office, we once again found ourselves deeply in debt and unprepared for a Baby Boom retirement that is now starting to take place. When I took office, our projected deficit was more than $1 trillion. On top of that, we faced a terrible financial crisis and a recession that, like most recessions, led us to temporarily borrow even more. In this case, we took a series of emergency steps that saved millions of jobs, kept credit flowing, and provided working families extra money in their pockets. It was the right thing to do, but these steps were expensive, and added to our deficits in the short term.

Short term? Seriously?

Oh, and then there’s this little tidbit:

There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.

Let me be clear: TAX CUTS ARE NOT SPENDING! President Obama acts as if the government owns it all and we the taxpayers are lucky to get anything. Maybe he doesn’t think that way but his equating tax cuts leads me to think otherwise.

The Wall Street Journal had this to say about Obama’s plan to tax those with higher incomes in their Review & Outlook column yesterday:

Under the Obama tax plan, the Bush rates would be repealed for the top brackets. Yet the “cost” of extending all the Bush rates in 2011 over 10 years was about $3.7 trillion. Some $3 trillion of that was for everything but the top brackets—and Mr. Obama says he wants to extend those rates forever. According to Internal Revenue Service data, the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 trillion. Even if all these Americans—most of whom are far from wealthy—were taxed at 100%, it wouldn’t cover Mr. Obama’s deficit for this year.

Not surprisingly, I wasn’t impressed with Obama’s speech in the least. What about you?

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