Paperman299
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- Apr 16, 2014
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Obama s Budget Busts Spending Caps - Conn CarrollObama's "increased spending?" You might want to compare the deficit on Bush's last budget to the deficit now.
President Obama's fiscal 2016 budget will call for a seven percent discretionary spending increase, busting the budget spending caps Democrats and Republicans agreed to in 2011.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest all but confirmed a Thursday Bloomberg story reporting that Obama's next budget, to be released February 2nd, will ask Congress to spend $68 billion more than the current budget limit agreement allows.
Asked if Obama new budget would hike spending, Earnest replied, "The President has been pretty clear about the fact over the last two weeks that now is exactly the right time for us start making some policy decisions that will invest in middle class families."
Thanks to a slowly recovering economy, the federal budget deficit has shrunk from $1.4 trillion in Obama's first year in office, when he passed a trillion dollar stimulus, to just $506 billion today, a figure still higher than any year President Bush was in office.
And according to the Congressional Budget Office, the deficit will continue to fall in 2015, sinking to $469 billion. But thanks to exploding mandatory programs, including Obamacare, the deficit will then begin to rise again, hitting $556 billion when Obama leaves office and reaching $737 billion by 2020.
It is unclear if Obama's new budget will have any new policies that address the deficit explosion set to detonate after he leaves office.
So we're just glazing right over the fact that the deficit has been cut to 1/3 of what it was? I love how the article tries to frame this, by the way. "...a figure still higher than any year President Bush was in office." As if the deficit that Obama has been struggling to downsize his entire presidency didn't come directly from Bush's own final budget.
If so-called fiscal conservatives cared about the budget, they would have cared when it was their own party ramping up spending. Instead, those were the days of "deficits don't matter." The moment spending became a good way to attack their political opposition, "deficits don't matter" transformed into "fiscal conservatism." And now that that opposition has been shown to be decreasing spending, we have to deal with squabbles over increased spending in one area while overall spending still comes down.
That, and claims of an impending "deficit bomb." Here's a question: since when did far-right conservatives place so much stock in projections? Now that you guys have become so focused on the future, please give me your opinions on this: