Hensarling destroys Obama in deficit kerfuffle
Posted by Bill Dupray
on Feb 1 2010 Filed under Politics.
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When Obama addressed the GOP retreat in Baltimore over the weekend, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex) took the president to task for paying lip service to deficit reduction and then exploding the national debt with trillion dollar budget deficits as far as the eye can see. As a side note, Obama referred to Jeb as “Jim” three times (which the official White House transcript edited despite video proof of the gaffe).
Here’s the transcript.
Hensarling: You are soon to submit a new budget, Mr. President. Will that new budget, like your old budget, triple the national debt and continue to take us down the path of increasing the cost of government to almost 25 percent of our economy? That’s the question, Mr. President.
Obama: Now, look, let’s talk about the budget, once again, because I’ll go through it with you line by line.
The fact of the matter is, is that when we came into office, the deficit was $1.3 trillion. $1.3 trillion. So — so when you say that suddenly I’ve got a monthly budget that is higher than the annual — or a monthly deficit that’s higher than the annual deficit left by Republicans, that’s factually just not true, and you know it’s not true.
And what is true is that we came in already with a $1.3 trillion deficit before I had passed any law. What is true is, we came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade.
Had nothing to do with anything that we had done. It had to do with the fact that in 2000, when there was a budget surplus of $200 billion, you had a Republican administration and a Republican Congress, and we had two tax cuts that weren’t paid for, you had a prescription drug plan — the biggest entitlement plan, by the way, in several decades — that was passed, without it being paid for, you had two wars that were done through supplementals, and then you had $3 trillion projected because of the lost revenue of this recession.
That’s $8 trillion. Now, we increased it by $1 trillion because of the spending that we had to make on the stimulus.
I am happy to have any independent factchecker out there take a look at your presentation versus mine in terms of the accuracy of what I just said.
Hensarling didn’t appreciate being called a liar by the president, so he went on Morning Joe to have his own Joe Wilson moment to prove the president, who welcomed the fact-checking, was, in fact the liar.
Transcript:
Well, either the President misunderstood the point or he just hasn’t been well informed. If you look at the 12 years when Republicans controlled the Congress, the average annual deficit was about $104 billion. I’m not proud of that number. That’s too high. But in the three years that Democrats have controlled Congress, the average annual deficit is now $1.1 Trillion. Do the math. What used to be an annual deficit under Republicans has become a monthly deficit under Democrats.
Did the president think he was going to get away with a provably false claim that his astonishing, historic budget deficits were somehow less than those of his predecessors? The man has an inexplicable supply of self-confidence.
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