My Monday column is an extension of yesterday's post about the president's record on the deficit and government spending.
Illustrative of his contempt for the truth, Mitt Romney's campaign website continues to host the following statement: "Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history."
On Friday, we discovered yet another reason why this is a super-colossal lie.
With the end of fiscal year 2012, the Congressional Budget Office announced the 2012 federal budget deficit: $1.1 trillion. Taken purely at face value, this number is enormous. Yet every Democrat, and especially the Obama campaign, ought to be telling anyone who will listen: Not only has the president cut the deficit by $312 billion during his first term (so far), but he's cut the deficit by $200 billion in the past year alone. And the CBO projected that the 2013 Obama budget, if enacted as is, would shrink the deficit to $977 billion -- a four year total of nearly $500 billion in deficit reduction.
Okay, yeah, I get it. It's risky to mention the deficit, but not when you couch it in math and the facts.
As I've documented before, the CBO reported in January, 2009 that the federal budget deficit for that fiscal year, which began on October 1, 2008, was already $1.2 trillion. President Obama's additional '09 spending added another $200 billion to the deficit, bringing the total to $1.412 trillion. Unprecedented and huge, but given the enormity of the financial crisis and the depth of the recession, there weren't many other options on the table. Add two wars into the mix and there you go... [continued]