The president (again) blames Bush for deficits, insurers for health care problems

The president came to my town yesterday, saying what he has been saying for the past few months – that he inherited a 1.3 trillion dollar deficit so we shouldn’t criticize him for turning it into a 1.75 trillion dollar deficit. That health care is broken, insurance companies are the problem, and under his plan you can keep your doctor and health plan even though the bill moving through the House contains numerous restrictions on both. Will he veto that bill if it passes? Of course not. Fast forward to the bill-signing and we will be told the bill didn’t have everything he wanted, but we had to act with urgency! 

The problem is that the president says one thing, Congress passes something different, and he signs it. No earmarks! Nine thousand earmarks in the stimulus bill, and he signs it. Bills will be available on the internet for a week to let everyone read them!  Not even Members of Congress have had a chance to read the major bills passed this year.

Mr. Obama spoke in the gym of my daughters’ high school, and maybe that’s why I was particularly irked by some of the more Pinnochio-esque statements, such as:

“when I hear critics talk about out-of-control spending, I can’t help but remember that those same critics contributed to the $1.3 trillion deficit we inherited when I took office – a debt that is partially a result of two tax cuts that went primarily to the wealthiest few…”

This one is a whopper. In the four years after the 2003 Bush tax cuts, federal revenues increased by $700 billion from $1.8 trillion to $2.5 trillion. From 2004 to 2007 deficits decreased from $412 billion to $160 billion. Bush’s last deficit (FY 2008) was $454 billion. Obama voted for TARP, bailed out GM, Chrysler, and other entities once he became president, pushed through the $800 billion stimulus, another $410 billion in extra spending for FY 2009, and a FY 2010 budget with a projected deficit of $1.3 trillion.

And in this quote he seems to be in an entirely different world:

“Less than one month after taking office, we enacted the most sweeping economic recovery package in history – and we did so without any of the earmarks that waste tax dollars on pet projects.”

That would be news to anyone who watches TV or gets their news on the internet, because wasteful spending has been well documented. Here is what ProPublica, a non-profit investigative journalism group, said about the stimulus bill:
“In theory and publicity, the package is "earmark free." But it contains dozens of narrowly defined programs that send money to specific areas or cater to special interests, despite President Obama's pledge to pass "an economic recovery plan that is free from earmarks and pet projects." Read more here.  And here is more from U.S. News & World Report.

And the bill he signed contained many billions more for questionable purposes, if not outright waste, as reported in The Wall Street Journal months ago:
“We've looked it over, and even we can't quite believe it. There's $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn't turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There's even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.”
 

The president lauded his “tax cuts:”
 

“One-third of the money is for tax relief that is going to families and small businesses. For Americans struggling to pay rising bills with shrinking wages, we have kept a campaign promise to put a middle class tax cut in the pockets of 95 percent of working families – a tax cut that began showing up in paychecks about three months ago.”

A) It’s worth about $8-$10 a week, which is unlikely to stimulate anything
B) It expires at the end of this year, which means your taxes will go back up in 5 months

And one more quote worth mentioning, this one about the health care debate:

“First of all, no one is talking about some government takeover of health care. Under the reform I’ve proposed, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan….folks out there need to stop scaring everyone.”

Maybe people are calling it a government takeover because of the (at least) 71 areas in the House bill where government authority over doctors, patients, hospitals and insurance companies is increased, well documented by the Economic Policy Journal’s Peter Fleckstein and Portland Civil Rights Examiner Dianne Cotter. Some examples: creation of a National Health Choices Commission, a Health Care Services Corps, national standards for all health plans, a health care affirmative action program, penalties for hospitals that the government judges have too many ‘preventable readmissions,’ penalties on employers who do not provide health insurance, creation of a federal Comparative Effective Research Trust Fund, imposition of a 2.5% income tax on any individual who does not have the required health care coverage, government mandates for health care efficiency and productivity, creation of a Public Health Workforce Corps, government restrictions on expansions of hospitals, and mandated end-of-life counseling for senior citizens.

I know, I know, the president is so cool! And it was very cool to have him at Broughton High School in Raleigh. But after those tingly feelings subside, take a closer look at what the mellifluous man in the suit is saying.
 

For more info:
The Top 9 Wasteful Projects in the Stimulus Bill, by Fox News, historical revenue and deficit data from the Congressional Budget Office, the 9 thousand earmarks in the stimulus bill, how much has been spent on the bailouts and economic stimulus, and the CBOs tracking report on how much of the stimulus has been spent., photos by Corey Lowenstein of the president's visit to Raleigh.