Will Republicans/Tea Partiers/their pundits and pols and all anti-big bovt goofballs everywhere be forced to quit the constant lie that Obama and Democrats are big government spenders that are solely responsible for the deficit woes that started with the crash of the economy at the end of Bush’s eight years at the helm.
“The Rapidly Shrinking Federal Deficit”
by Bill McBride on 4/11/2013 11:58:00 AM
Read more at Calculated Risk: "The Rapidly Shrinking Federal Deficit"
As long as they can sell their snake oil to those gullible enough to keep re-electing them, it doesn’t matter.
Lots of people posture about the deficit: few follow the numbers, least of all journalists. Expect denial.
I debated this at a conservative website soon after the Jan 1 budget deal reworked the long run deficit numbers. It wasn’t pretty. http://twitchy.com/2013/01/11/white-house-response-to-death-star-petition-is-unintentionally-funny/#comment-764618591
eg on the Affordable Care Act’s effect on the deficit (it decreases it):
On other matters, Calculated Risk is an excellent blog.
No, they won’t stop. Politicians stop lying when they stop breathing.
Yes you certainly did:
just this week I listened to Sean Hannity (Not a journalist) and he repeated the bold faced lie that ObamaCare will cost the Taxpayer $6 trillion dollars. He even had a soft-spokent expert on his show to defend ObamaCare who kept telling Sean rather mildly (I don’t know who they stay so mild) that he was not counting the Revenue Side of Obama Care and that overall Obama Care cuts the deficit.
Sean won’t hear it. He just repeats his lies with loud mouth self-righteous bluster and that keeps his corporate Sponsors happy and the the right wing dumbed down audience happy.
Are there any right-wingers on this forum that try to defend this lie?
What a about the libertarians on this forum. What do they say about Obama Care. They are the ones making up a lot of the Tea Party crowd.
The deficit has been shrinking, mainly due to spending not increasing over the last three years, which in turn has come from the Republicans lopping about $200 billion per year off of the President’s budget requests. The same will probably happen this year. The President has been requesting $3.8 trillion or so since FY2011, and has been getting $3.5-$3.6 trillion.
As for the ACA, it’s deficit reduction is contingent on all of the taxes and cuts actually staying in place, and of course the program not exceeding planned appropriations. Given the history of health care entitlements, it’s not farfetched at all for critics to claim it will blow up the deficit. Both Medicare and Medicaid vastly exceeded estimates.
You are comparing two things. The deficit measures the difference between taxes collected and money spent. One could be a small spender and have a huge deficit or be a huge spender and have no deficit. The idea that taxes have gone up under Obama is not something most conservatives would argue with you about.
The idea that Obama has been a big spender is inarguably correct. The entire federal budget last year was 3.5 trillion dollars. 10 years ago it was 2.1 trillion dollars. The budget last year was equal to the two highest budgets of the Clinton years combined. The deficit the last twelve months was equal to the entire budget in 1985 at the height of Reagan’s cold war build up. As a percentage of GDP budgets have not been this high consistently since WW2.
What is happening is that there was a huge increase in government spending to pay for the stimulus that was going to get us out of the recession. Since then government spending has been flat. Stimulus was designed and sold to the public as a one time huge influx of money. Using the stimulus year as a baseline is disengenous.
So it is in fact a right wing myth that Obama’s out of control and reckless spending policies are the culprit in driving up the huge post recession budget deficits for the past four years.
The ACA is at least revenue neutral so it is a lie by Sean Hannity & others to claim it will cost Taxpayers an amount around six trillion dollars.
How do they justify or legitimize the lies is the question?
I don’t disagree with your comment entirely (although I’d argue that the economy as a whole has performed better in periods of larger outlays and revenues than in periods of lower ones), but this comment is a bit misleading.
The total outlays as a percentage of GDP since Obama took office (so starting with the 2009 budget, which was really a Bush budget, but whatever) have been: 25.2, 24.1, 24.1, 22.8, 22.7 (projected 2013), 22.2 (projected 2014).
Those last numbers are not at all out of line with the early-mid 1990’s numbers (which were consistently between 21-22.5), and in 1985 we hit 22.8 (exactly the 2012 number). This is all found here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals
Disregarding a 2.5% drop in federal spending as a percentage of GDP is selling Obama (and the House GOP) short - real progress has been made on the spending side, and more is planned (the 2018 projected number is 21.2%) Similarly we have raised revenue from a low of 15.1% (which really is a historical anomaly - the last time it was that low was 1950) to a projected 16.7% for 2013. Combined those two efforts are projected to cut our 10% of GDP deficit in 2009 to only 6% this year (and a projected 4.4% next year, and 2.3% in 2018). That’s a real accomplishment, considering we managed to do it without wrecking our recovery entirely.
This libertarian would post two simple questions.
What is the current federal deficit?
What was the federal deficit back in fiscal 2007?
The answers are $911 billion according to the link you posted and $163 billion.
During most of the Bush years, Democrats were complaining ceaselessly about the enormous budget deficits that Bush was ringing up. The largest deficit during the Bush years was $459 billion in 2008, roughly half of the current deficit.
That is why I said consistently this high. Every year of Obama has been higher than the high of the early 90s and spending over 24% of the economy like Obama did both years when he had a Democrat house had not occured since WW2.
Congratulations for you and your colleagues on getting the deficit down to 6.0% of GDP. Remember that even with that huge effort on your part, a deficit that large had only been achieved once before since WW2. As long as Republicans keep the house there is a chance to get back to historical levels of deficit spending, but any impartial observer has to conclude that the spending of Obama’s first term has been without precedent without a global war.
It is not a lie, because it is impossible for a prediction of the future to be a lie. There are certain assumptions built into the budget projections for Obamacare, if one rejects these assumptions and substitutes other assumptions then the numbers change. Neither set of numbers is a lie, just a predicitions.
The first set of assumptions is the number of businesses that opt to pay penalties rather than keep providing health insurance to their employees. If the number of businesses that drop their employees on the Obamacare exchanges is high than the expense of insuring them shoots up. If the number is low than the cost is more manageable.
The second big assumption is that changes to how doctors and hospitals get paid will not be overturned. A previous attempt at slowing the growth of health care costs cut the amount the government will pay doctors and hospitals. This amount has always been overturned by the Congress regardless of what party controls it. If you believe that Congress will stop doing this, then Obamacare is more affordable. If you believe Congress will continue to do this then Obamacare will be much more expensive.
It seems to me that opinions on the first question are entirely speculative and there is no way of knowing until it happens. On the second question the Obamacare skeptics have the much better arguement.
When it was first passed Obamacare was advertised as contained 1.4 trillion in deficit savings. It quickly became clear that the 700 billion CLASS was going to save was unworkable. Next the taxes the new rules on 1099s was supposed to raise were overturned. Now Obamacare is supposed to be just revenue neutral. There has been a change in the projections that have added a trillion dollars to the cost of Obamacare since it was passed and it has not even been implemented yet. Given the history of government healthcare projections I expect more cost increases as implementation grows imminent.
I just love how all blame or praise for deficits is directed towards the sitting president, not the actual body that has the spending/taxing power.
You’ve repeated this nonsensical argument twice in this thread, so it’s worth noting.
The two statements do not contradict each other (although I think you meant “deficit neutral” rather than “revenue neutral” - the ACA is supposedly the former, but it’s certainly not the latter).
If a given program or law spends six trillion dollars and also increases taxes by six trillion dollars, then it is both deficit neutral and costs taxpayers six trillion dollars.
For some reason, supporters of ACA have a tendency to make specious arguments of this sort, confusing deficit reduction with cost.
[Note: I don’t know about whether it’s $6 trillion specifically - I imagine it depends of the time horizon. I’m addressing the logic.]
This is good - give credit to the Republicans for shrinking spending, while at the same time, commentators lie about Obama increasing spending. It’s a two-fer!
Perhaps you’re using the same math that told you that Romney was a sure thing to win the election, due to the errors in polling and oversampling of democrats or some such thing?
(welcome back by the way - we thought you had jumped off a bridge after the election)
A few differences, of course. Those deficits occurred during economic good times. Deficits are expected to be larger during economic downturns. Also, the deficits then were based on tax cuts that were always ill-advised. And finally, the economy is a bigger problem than the deficit is today. Balancing the budget today (or in the next couple of years) would actually set back the effort to spur economic growth.
Had we stuck with Clinton’s formula for surpluses, the fiscal picture would be much better today. If we return to Clinton’s formula for surpluses, the fiscal picture would improve, too, along with the economy.
His high spending policies got us the deficit we peaked at, and he’d continue to increase spending about 8% per year without the GOP check on his actions. We know he’d do this because that’s what every one of his budgets has proposed. Between 5-10% increases in spending.
The word “lie” is WAY too strong here, given that both what the CBO says and what Hannity says are predictions of what will happen in the future. You can’t lie about the future, because what is in the future is not fact, it is speculation.
Given the history of past health care entitlements, it’s entirely reasonable to believe that ACA will cost six times more than projected. Of course, during the past entitlement debates there was no CBO, so maybe the ACA estimates are accurate, whereas the Medicare and Medicaid estimates were intentional lies by Democrats trying to sell the programs to the public.
True, Congress is more responsible for deficits than the President, but then you’d have to look at deficits by who controlled Congress, which would give you a completely different picture of who has historically been responsible for deficits than has been portrayed.
The reason spending is flat since 2011 is simple: Republicans won Congress, so now we’ve got spending control. And we’ll continue to have spending control until one party wins unified control again(doesn’t matter which one, unified control= big spending).
I hid my head in shame and didn’t come back until I’d completely absorbed the lessons from that debacle. Straight Dope is a high quality board and it doesn’t need me stinking up the place. So I’ll stick to what I’m good at, which is budget issues and er, budget issues.
Agreed. Spending in those years was clearly stimulative and, IMO, too high. Fortunately it has come down as the economy has recovered, and will continue to do so. I have given praise both to Obama and the GOP House for that. If we get down to 21% in 2018, I will feel pretty good about that. 19-20% would be even better.
Agreed. If only the GOP wasn’t bat-shit crazy about non-fiscal issues I’d have no problem keeping them in control of the House. I personally think a Democratic President and a GOP House/Democratic Senate has produced the best results for both the economy and the avoidance of stupid wars in the last 40 years or so.
Well, I was pretty explicit in dividing my praise for the deficit reduction. I think that’s why my preferred combo (if not for the silliness of the current GOP on gay rights, immigration, etc) seems to work - the Democratic President stops the push for tax cuts (and sometimes gets tax hikes) while the GOP House stops the push for higher spending (and sometimes gets spending cuts).
ETA: One question to those that give Obama no credit for the current deficit reduction - if the projections are right and the deficit in 2016 is something like 2.8% of GDP, would you support the status quo of a Democratic President and the GOP House? Because we will have had two 8-year cycles: one in which we went from a surplus of 2.4% of GDP in the first year to -3.2% in the last, and another in which we went from -10.1% to -2.8%.