A Legacy of Budget Trickery

[boedicca]

The U.S. was conned by budget gimmickry led by Peter Orszag. Once the gimmicks are removed, ObamaCare will add $500B to the deficit during it's first 10 years (and that is with only 6 years of benefits).

In addition, the baseline budget itself has been distorted with gimmicks in order to conceal the magnitude of proposed spending increases.

...After initial drafts of the law proved far too expensive, ObamaCare’s authors knew they had to meet two criteria: Keep total spending for the first decade below a trillion dollars, and make sure the Congressional Budget Office reports the law will reduce the deficit.

The White House and its allies in Congress succeeded, but only by piling on the gimmicks. So, for example, in order to keep the total first-decade cost down, ObamaCare delayed the bulk of the spending in the bill until 2014 — meaning that the 2010-2019 10-year score only accounted for six years of spending.

The official estimates also conveniently omitted hundreds of billions in additional spending that will be necessary to implement the law. According to an estimate by former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, running ObamaCare will eventually require $274 billion in extra spending.

Indeed, in a paper published in the June issue of the journal Health Affairs, Holtz-Eakin estimated that, once all the budget gimmickry is removed, the law will increase the deficit by more than half a trillion dollars — and that’s just in the first 10 years.

Under Orszag’s watch, budget gimmicks became a way of life for the Obama White House. Both he and Obama may want to pretend their budget numbers tell the truth, but at this point, it’s tough to see their constant fiscal fakery as anything other than a long exercise in make believe.

A legacy of budget trickery - NYPOST.com

 

[Mr. Shaman]

The U.S. was conned by budget gimmickry led by Peter Orszag. Once the gimmicks are removed, ObamaCare will add $500B to the deficit during it's first 10 years (and that is with only 6 years of benefits).

In addition, the baseline budget itself has been distorted with gimmicks in order to conceal the magnitude of proposed spending increases.

Gee......where'd ya' hear that......from the Bush Family??

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"When Bush left the White House, the last debt numbers published by the Bush Regime was $5.66 trillion, when, in fact, the actual size of the debt was about $14 trillion. In other words, the national debt was about three times the stated numbers.

By April he had learned of the Grand Bushonian Fraud -- how the Bush Cabal denuded the Social Security General Trust Fund and 43 other public trust funds out of $5 trillion and then stuffed them full of worthless non-marketable US Treasury securities. This is the time when Clinton began to talk extensively with Alan Greenspan. He understood that something had to be done because we were virtually in a crisis."

 

[boedicca]

Orszag didn't work for BOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, you moron.

 

[Mr. Shaman]

The U.S. was conned by budget gimmickry led by Peter Orszag. Once the gimmicks are removed, ObamaCare will add $500B to the deficit during it's first 10 years (and that is with only 6 years of benefits).

A legacy of budget trickery - NYPOST.com

Oh, those bloggers.............

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[Soggy in NOLA]

Let's not forget the budget trickery that gave us the mythical Clinton surplus.

 

[Claudette]

Should anyone be surprised by this??

I sure ain't. Anyone but a complete moron didn't know that they played the numbers game with the CBO to get something favorable.

Hope Pelosi and Reid both get the boot.

Oh yeah. Poorhouse here we come. Jeeze.

 

[boedicca]

This is pretty grim. If what the gimmicky Orszag is reporting is this bad, reality is much much worse:

They weren’t entirely successful in burying the report, but it’s understandable why they tried. The numbers are eye-popping. The budget deficit in 2010 is expected to set a record at $1.471 trillion – or 10% of GDP. In 2011, the administration projects the deficit will again top $1.4 trillion. From 2010 to 2020, the Obama budget plan would run up a cumulative deficit of nearly $10 trillion, and the nation’s debt would reach $18.5 trillion in 2020, up from $5.8 trillion at the end of 2008.

Even more ominous for the president is the economic forecast. It shows unemployment remaining at over 8% through the 2012 presidential re-election campaign, despite the assumption that relatively normal economic growth would have been underway for more than two years by then.

The primary problem is quite plainly out of control federal spending. In 2008, total federal outlays were about $2.9 trillion. President Obama wants to add $1 trillion to that total in 2011, or about a 33% expansion of governmental activity in just three years. And that’s just the beginning of it. By the end of the decade, federal outlays would reach $5.6 trillion, nearly double what they were a little more than a decade earlier, and that’s assuming a massive and speculative peace dividend after 2011 and cuts in domestic discretionary programs that the president has yet to identify. Of course, the baby boomers are also now entering their retirement years, and will begin flooding into the Social Security and Medicare program in the next few years, pushing spending on those programs up even more rapidly than they have grown in the past. By 2030, there will be 71 million Americans age 65 and older, up from 41 million this year.

All of this building budgetary pressure is now a clear drag on growth and a hindrance to hiring. Firms are worried that the “solution” politicians will ultimately pursue to close the widening gap between federal revenues and spending is more debilitating tax increases. The latest long-run budget forecast from the Congressional Budget Office won’t allay those fears.

In that report, CBO found that a massive tax hike is already in the offing. Historically, federal taxes have hovered at around 18 to 19% of GDP. CBO expects that number to rise to 23% of GDP by 2035, even if nothing is done to change current law. Income taxes will begin to rise automatically next year if Congress lets tax rates revert to their pre-Bush levels. In addition, the cuts to rates on dividends and other investment earnings from 2003 – cuts that were which instrumental to igniting growth during the post-9/11 slump – would also vanish....


A Mid-Year Update on the President?s Plan to Spend, and Then Tax, in Epic Proportions | e21 - Economic Policies for the 21st Century

 

[boedicca]

This is the money shot:

The president’s governing and budget strategy should now be evident to one and all. He has spent his first two years in office working to secure expansions in the scope and power of the federal government. Working with very sizeable Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, he passed an $800 billion-plus “stimulus” program, a massive health care entitlement covering tens of millions of new beneficiaries, a full federal takeover of the student loan industry, and sweeping new regulations for the financial sector. All of these initiatives have increased federal power and spending and have been financed with new tax and regulatory burdens on the private sector of the American economy. And all were passed entirely on partisan lines, or with just token Republican support.

Now that a vastly expanded federal enterprise has been “locked in,” or so the Democrats now hope, the president and his team are looking to “pivot” and spend the coming period in the run-up to 2012 as would-be defenders of the U.S. treasury. The president is now pledging to attack runaway budget deficits starting with consideration of the recommendations of a presidentially-appointed debt commission, set to report – conveniently – just after the mid-term election. And he wants Republicans on the commission and in Congress to give him cover for the tax increases he is sure to seek to pay for the bloated government he has erected.


And why the Democrat majority control must end in November.