Comments (28) (Please sign in to comment)

1. 

   dtroutma said, 6 months ago

   Budget cuts for tax increases were offered a long time ago by the administration and Democrats the 10/1 offer, and roundly rejected by Boehner, Cantor, and McConnell.
2. 

   braindead08 said, 6 months ago

   Republicans won’t propose spending cuts. They want someone else to take that responsibility.
   -
   Repubicans ‘promise’ to raise taxes?
   Grover Norquist has had NO pledges broken yet.
   -

   Some Republicans have claimed that they might ‘for the good of the country’, but the bill to preserve tax cuts for the middle class, passed by the Senate, is being held up by Boehner for ‘leverage’. Leverage for what? Why to hold tax cuts for the middle class hostage for tax cuts for the rich.
3. 

   mickey1339 said, 6 months ago

   @dtroutma

   Where you get this as an offer from the democrats escapes me. There was a hypothetical question put forth in the republican primary debates about a 10 to 1 spending cuts to tax increases, never a real offer by the administration.

   http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/08/12/gop-taxes-straightjacket/
4. 

   TJDestry said, 6 months ago

   He’s already cut spending significantly. You’ve got the characters reversed on this one.
5. 

   uh-oh said, 6 months ago

   Just pay for it and shut up.
6. 

   SwimsWithSharks said, 6 months ago

   Start another war, GOP. That kind of spending doesn’t count, does it.
7. 

   SuperMax52 said, 6 months ago

   The middle class WILL be taxed out of existence. There is no middle class in Socialism. 55% of Americans say that they don’t mind being called Socialists. The demonization of the GOP will lead to a one party system (Democratic Socialists) All Hail Obama, King of the Dems.
8. 

   Chillbilly said, 6 months ago

   The law was designed to expire, although nobody thought that congress could be so dysfunctional as to actually let it happen. This completely plays against the GOP game of holding up laws that need to be passed. They are now forced to have to pass a law or take the blame for the biggest tax “increase” in a generation. The sweet irony.
9. 

   ansonia said, 6 months ago

   @TJDestry

   “He’s already cut spending significantly. "
   -
   Where?
10. 

    ansonia said, 6 months ago

    “Democrat spending cuts.” hahaha
11. 

    mickey1339 said, 6 months ago

    @Mr. King

    How exciting a new word. The urban dictionary defines “derpy:”
    “Clumsy or uncoordinated; prone to cause accidents likely due to some, often humourous, mental lapse.”
12. 

    Ms. Ima said, 6 months ago

    That football represents everyone’s savings, 401(k), Pre-tax and Roth IRA’s. The dems are going to grab it and run.
13. 

    Mneedle said, 6 months ago

    @braindead08

    Actually tou are wrong. The House sent budgets, with spending cuts to the Senate and Harry Reid refused to even bring it up for a counter offer. It is the Dems who are the obstructionists.
14. 

    ansonia said, 6 months ago

    @Mr. King

    Do you realize how nuts the Liberals here would go if I even jokingly referred anyone to a “radical Rightist” website? The irony…
    -
    Anyway, responding to your post about “spending growth.”
    .
    Well, since your article DOES start out “Rick Ungar, Contributor, writing from the left on politics and policy,” and all Left-wingers involved here, I did some fact-checking.
    .
    The chart in your article lists among its sources: the “Congressional Budget Office.” However, if you check it out, it was not CBO’s analysis that formed the basis of the claim, so that’s misleading.
    And I’ve seen this argument in Liberal publications before. In fact, Obama’s campaign website showed a version of the chart that was originally in a WSJ MarketWatch column by Rex Nutting. At the bottom of the website, Obama showed a “Fact Checkers Report.” Three were shown: MarketWatch, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, and Ezra Klein of The Washington Post.
    The Rex Nutting MarketWatch column is the one that started all of this, so it’s unclear how MarketWatch could fact check itself. Robinson and Klein are 2 of The Post’s best-known opinion columnists. Robinson writes from a left perspective. Klein writes financial stuff, mostly left-of-center. Both Robinson and Klein, in their columns, said that PolitiFact rated Nutting’s claim as “mostly true,” but that was incorrect, and PolitiFact later clarified that it assessed Nutting’s analysis as only “half true:” [I can point to previous “fact checks” done by PolitiFact that are nothing but opinions, and not fact-checking. But anyway….]
    .
    So here’s PolitFact:
    “Nutting attributed spending from the first year of every presidential term to the previous administration, arguing that every new president starts their term four months into a fiscal year begun under their predecessor. Historically, this has not been a particularly controversial approach, and even some of Nutting’s critics we spoke to agreed that it’s not a bad rule of thumb.
    But fiscal year 2009 was special because it came amid an economic and financial free fall that drove the nation’s leaders to spend a lot more than they ordinarily would.
    Our extensive consultations with budget analysts since our item was published convinces us that there’s no single “correct” way to divvy up fiscal 2009 spending, only a variety of plausible calculations. So the second portion of the Facebook claim — that Obama’s spending has risen “slower than at any time in nearly 60 years” - strikes us as Half True.”
    -——-
    So, the big question is how much of 2009 spending should be attributed to Obama’s policies, and different people come to slightly different conclusions, but no one ended up in the same place as Nutting.
    So let’s see how independent fact checkers evaluated Nutting’s analysis –
    Here’s a summary:
    .

    Associated Press:
    The problem with that rosy claim by MarketWatch is that the Wall Street bailout is part of the calculation. The bailout ballooned the 2009 budget just before Obama took office, making Obama’s 2010 results look smaller in comparison. And as almost $150 billion of the bailout was paid back during Obama’s watch, the analysis counted them as government spending cuts.
    It also assumes Obama had less of a role setting the budget for 2009 than he really did.
    The analysis simply looks at the year-to-year topline spending number for the government but doesn’t account for distortions baked into the figures by the Wall Street bailout and government takeover of the mortgage lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
    The MarketWatch study finds spending growth of only 1.4 percent over 2010-2013, or annual increases averaging 0.4 percent over that period. A fairer calculation would give Obama much of the responsibility for an almost 10 percent budget boost in 2009, then a 13 percent increase over 2010-2013, or average annual growth of spending of just more than 3 percent over that period.
    -
    Factcheck.org:
    Our own analysis leads us to conclude that Obama deserves responsibility for somewhat more fiscal 2009 spending than Nutting assigns to him. Spending in that year shot up an incredible $535 billion. Nutting holds Obama responsible for only 26 percent of that increase, but we conclude that Obama can fairly be assigned responsibility for as much as 38 percent.
    We also disagree with Nutting’s conclusion that Obama’s increases are the lowest since Eisenhower. Not only should Nutting have measured Obama’s increases from a lower base, in our judgment, he also fails to take account of inflation, which has been extraordinarily low during Obama’s term.
    -
    The Fact Checker:
    Nutting acknowledges that Obama is responsible for some 2009 spending but only assigns $140 billion. On the other end of his calculations, Nutting says that Obama plans to spend $3.58 trillion in 2013, citing the CBO budget outlook. But this figure is CBO’s baseline budget, which assumes no laws are changed, so this figure gives Obama credit for automatic spending cuts that he wants to halt. The correct figure to use is the CBO’s analysis of the president’s 2013 budget, which clocks in at $3.72 trillion.
    Obama’s numbers get even higher if you look at what he proposed to spend, using CBO’s estimates of his budgets. Nutting suggests that federal spending flattened under Obama, but another way to look at it is that it flattened at a much higher, post-emergency level — thanks in part to the efforts of lawmakers, not Obama.
    Another problem with Nutting’s analysis is that the figures are viewed in isolation and does not take into account either inflation or the relative size of the U.S. economy. In the post-war era, federal spending as a percentage of the U.S. economy has hovered around 20 percent, give or take a couple of percentage points. Under Obama, it has hit highs not seen since the end of World War II.
15. 

    cogitatingduck said, 6 months ago

    Whoever thinks this administration has made significant spending cuts isn’t looking at the big picture
16. Load the rest of the comments (13).