I'm still waiting for you to back this up:
As far as the comments above, you don't need to comment on them. We already know you agree.
Factually incorrect. The social security trustees report for 2000 had social security running out of funds to completely pay retirees in 2037.
http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/New/html/20000330.htmlOddly enough, that's about the same year as the more recent trustee's report.
So we were never prepared for the retirement of the boomers.
We were in surplus at the beginning of the last decade, until the the dot com bust though. Bush entered the Presidency in a recession.
"But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program -- but we didn't pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts -- tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.It sounds good, although the thought of Obama being critical of the free spending budget ways of the Congress during the Bush administration (which is what he is referring to), is that even with two unpaid for wars and an expensive unpaid for prescription drug program, we had a budget deficit of 160 billion in 2007. And that was on a downward glide of a Bush deficit high in 2004. So I would say the President is wrong about those reasons for the deficit.
"To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our national checkbook, consider this: in the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years." That sounds so absurd that I think the burden of proof should be on the President.
"But that's not what happened. And so, by the time I took office, we once again found ourselves deeply in debt and unprepared for a Baby Boom retirement that is now starting to take place. When I took office, our projected deficit was more than $1 trillion. On top of that, we faced a terrible financial crisis and a recession that, like most recessions, led us to temporarily borrow even more. In this case, we took a series of emergency steps that saved millions of jobs, kept credit flowing, and provided working families extra money in their pockets. It was absolutely the right thing to do, but these steps were expensive, and added to our deficits in the short term.
"So that's how our fiscal challenge was created. That's how we got here."I would give the President truthiness right up to "emergency steps that saved millions of jobs..." Where is the evidence of that? The President or his administration will point to the CBO report on the Stimulus, which, the President or his administration
will not point out was based only on computer models, not with with real world data. Hopefully they will take up that project again and use actual data from the economy. The credit flow problem was solved before he got into office. He did have a tax cut in the stiimulus, so that's something I guess.
This was a prepared speech so I'm sure this was reviewed, so they really meant to say all this. More's the pity.
