Fact Checking False Claim Obama Budget Plan ‘Reduces Deficit by $5.3 Trillion in a Decade’

New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes recently made the outlandish claim that the President’s budget will reduce the deficit by $5.3 trillion over a ten-year period. But a closer look at this claim proves that it just isn’t true.

Firstly, Obama and his surrogates don’t even claim a savings of $5.3 trillion, so it is a mystery where Calmes got this number. At the late Democrat convention, for instance, Bill Clinton claimed that Obama’s plan would save $4 trillion, not $5.3. But even Clinton’s mythical savings was deemed untrue by the Washington Post’s fact checker.

Worse, all those supposed savings in the Obama proposal is from tax hikes, not any actual cuts in spending. On top of that, most of the supposed savings are mere accounting gimmicks, not true savings.

The other false characterization of Obama’s spending proposal is that he means to “pay down out debt.” To pay down something, of course, that means to pay off or reduce that something. Obama’s plan also does not do this.

The truth is, Obama’s latest budget proposal, which calls for $1.8 trillion in new taxes, calls for $1.5 trillion in new spending! That means that Obama’s massive tax hike proposal doesn’t go to pay down the deficit but to fund new government spending.

Far from spending the deficit down, the president’s last budget plan from July makes it clear that in ten years our national debt will increase by $10.6 trillion.

But despite all the evidence proving the lie to Obama’s budget — a budget that garnered not one vote from either party in the House or Senate — his campaign has repeatedly made the false claim that he’d save $4 trillion over ten years and now The New York Times has inexplicably upped that fantasy savings to $5.3 trillion.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) has already called on the Obama campaign to pull these misleading ads. The Romney campaign should too.

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Warner Todd Huston

Warner Todd Huston


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