Obama Speaks

            Furious. Disgusted. Sickened. It is difficult for me to find the right word to describe how I felt while watching President Obama's April 13th speech to the nation on the budget. Paul Ryan described it as "excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate." I think Ryan was much too kind. I would have preferred gratuitously insulting, scandalously mendacious, and incredibly incompetent. It was demagoguery at its worst.

            Obama was not satisfied with just blaming the previous administration or conducting class warfare on the rich. That was to be expected. But after wasting half his speech praising the benefits of cooperation by trotting out a litany of worn-out platitudes, he attacked Ryan's proposal for reforming Medicare  by predicting drastic consequences for seniors. But he deliberately omitted mentioning that the reforms would not take effect until 2022 and would therefore not affect anyone now 55 years old or over. Mendacity takes many forms.

            When Obama said that we should all be ready to sacrifice, he targeted only the rich. He did not mention that the top 1% of wage earners already pay 40% of income taxes, that the top 5% pay 60%, and the bottom 50% pay only 3%,  with most of them paying nothing. Worse, he said that for him to get a $200,000 tax credit, thirty-three poor people would have to pay $6,000 each to make up for it. How can anybody let him get away with such a despicable lie? That was class warfare at its most outrageous.

            Obama said his proposal would cut the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 12 years. Half of that would come from reduced costs, a trillion would come from reduced interest on the debt, and another trillion from tax reform (read tax increases on the rich). Ignoring for the moment the total absence of specifics in his plan for reducing costs and the negative effects raising taxes would have on our struggling economy, how can Obama's plan possibly reduce interest on the debt?

            I must be missing something. Let's do the math. Maintaining an annual deficit at the current rate of $1.3 trillion a year (with Obamacare kicking in, projections are much higher),  would result in adding  $15.6 trillion to the national debt over the next 12 years. If Obama's plan reduces the debt by cutting $2 trillion in costs and raising $1 trillion in taxes, that still leaves $12.6 trillion to be added to the debt over that period. How in the world would that reduce interest on the debt by a trillion dollars? The Chinese must be laughing their heads off at Obama's math.

            I came across a quote recently that says, in part, "The danger to America is not Obama, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the presidency... The Republic can survive a Barack Obama who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president."

            I disagree. Obama is no fool. He is a clever liar who takes us all for fools. I prefer the quote, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."