At his press conference defending his FY 2012 budget yesterday President Barack Obama told the American people: “What my budget does is to put forward some tough choices, some significant spending cuts so that by the middle of this decade our annual spending will match our annual revenues. We will not be adding more to the national debt.” This is such a preposterous claim that every media outlet that has covered this remark has also noted that it is completely false.
McClatchy Newspapers: “President Barack Obama’s claim Tuesday that his proposed budget would stop adding to the national debt is wrong — and is proved wrong in his own budget.”
The Associated Press: “Obama at one point overstated the achievements of his budget, asserting that by the middle of the current decade annual federal spending would match annual revenues. “We will not be adding more to the national debt,” he said. But his budget shows deficits as well as debt increasing every year through 2021.”
PolitiFact: “These numbers show that the publicly held debt rises each year. Two other measures of debt also go up every year from 2011 to 2021 — gross federal debt (which includes public debt plus debt held by other parts of the government) and public debt adjusted for financial assets held by the government. So the contention that “we will not be adding more to the national debt” after the middle of the decade seems incorrect on its face.”
The reality is that President Obama’s budget calls for a 49% rise in total spending over the next ten years. Driven by this spending explosion the President’s budget will cause the publicly held debt to rise from $9.5 trillion this year to $16.7 trillion in 2021. And it only gets worse from there. If entitlement spending is not controlled, and President Obama’s budget does nothing to control it, spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will consume all federal revenues by 2052.
