AP Criticizes President Obama On Deficits
Just when I thought I’d seen it all, I read something like this AP article, which actually does a pretty good job factchecking President Obama. Here’s the opening smackdown:
“That wasn’t me,” President Barack Obama said on his 100th day in office, disclaiming responsibility for the huge budget deficit waiting for him on Day One.
It actually was him, and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years, who shaped a budget so out of balance. And as a presidential candidate and president-elect, he backed the twilight Bush-era stimulus plan that made the deficit deeper, all before he took over and promoted spending plans that have made it much deeper still.
President Obama can deny it if he wants but there’s no denying that he’s exploded the deficit. There’s also no doubting that Speaker Pelosi and her Democrats helped run the deficit up to a staggering level.
His stimulus bill, which is $800,000,000,000 worth of pork, didn’t get a single House Republican vote. Ditto with President Obama’s budget blueprint. Those plans have nothing but Democrat fingerprints on them.
Here’s one of Obama’s talking points that the AP refuted:
OBAMA: “Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit…. That wasn’t me. Number two, there is almost uniform consensus among economists that in the middle of the biggest crisis, financial crisis, since the Great Depression, we had to take extraordinary steps. So you’ve got a lot of Republican economists who agree that we had to do a stimulus package and we had to do something about the banks. Those are one-time charges, and they’re big, and they’ll make our deficits go up over the next two years.” - in Missouri.
It’s interesting (deceitful, too) that President Obama talks about “one-time charges” even though he knows most of his stimulus and omnibus bill spending got added to the FY2010 budget’s baseline.
I find it ironic that President Obama says that he doesn’t want to own the car companies. This morning, President Obama all but fired Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli in announcing that Chrysler is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection:
The bankruptcy will be filed under a section of the law that allows a company to shed bad assets and some liabilities. The administration expects it to last only up to 60 days.
Obama’s auto task force in March rejected Chrysler’s restructuring plan and gave it 30 days to make another effort, including a tie-up with Fiat. The company has borrowed $4 billion from the federal government and needs billions more to keep operating.
The UAW agreement, which would take effect May 4, meets Treasury requirements for continued loans to Chrysler Corp., and includes commitments from Fiat to manufacture a new small car in one of Chrysler’s U.S. facilities and to share key technology with Chrysler.
Republicans were advising that Chrysler and GM should file for chapter 11 protections months ago. Earlier, he fired GM CEO Rick Waggoner. For someone with big problems on his hands, President Obama sure finds time to run car manufacturers.
We can’t forget, too, that this administration’s Treasury secretary asked Congress to pass legislation giving him the authority to take over major financial institutions if he alone deemed it important to do so.
Thus far, I haven’t seen proof that President Obama cares about prosperity or liberty. In fact, all I have on the liberty front is proof that he’s willing to take control of things that the government doesn’t have the authority to take control of.
Whether he’ll admit it or not, the Obama administration owns this economy. People won’t blame him for creating this mess. They’ll just affix blame on him for not having the right solutions for it.
Technorati Tags: Deficits, President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Bailouts, Bankruptcy, Pork, Stimulus Bill, Chrysler, General Motors, Robert Nardelli, Rick Waggoner, Tim Geithner, Economy
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
April 30th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
My my! Could AP’s criticism be the periscope tip of a snorkeling submarine of discontent from the media?
Nah, I kind of doubt it, but there are some signs of balking among the bluedog Democrats at the ever growing spending binge and power grabs by Obama. Overheard the other night on Jerry Doyle, that Max Baucus (D. Montana) is giving Obama a “D” on the rule of law. Baucus is anything but a conservative, but things like gun control, taxes, and being overall constitutional about things are hot buttons to independent minded ranchers, grain farmers and folks in Montana, and if Baucus likes being in Washington, he does need to pay attention to stuff like that.