Tuesday, June 12, 2012

$1 Trillion Deficit Approaching- Obama Broken Promise: To Cut Deficit In Half By End Of First Term

By Susan Duclos

February 23, 2009: Video Flashback below:






Barack Obama "That's why today I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office"

Washington Post, June 12, 2012: "The federal budget deficit is approaching $1 trillion for a fourth straight year even though the government is collecting more tax revenue than last year."

Is it any wonder why Democratic strategists don't want to discuss what Obama has done with the economy over the last three years, they want him to talk about future plans?

Clinton Democrats are hitting the "panic button":

"What is clear from this fresh look at public consciousness on the economy is how difficult this period has been for both non-college-educated and college-educated voters — and how vulnerable the prevailing narratives articulated by national Democratic leaders are," they write. "We will face an impossible headwind in November if we do not move to a new narrative, one that contextualizes the recovery but, more importantly, focuses on what we will do to make a better future for the middle class."

Problem there, as the video above shows, Obama doesn't have a good track record of keeping his pledges because while he might have believed his policies would work in February 2009, when he had a Democratically controlled Congress to rubber stamp his agenda, it is now 2012, he knows his policies didn't work, yet all he proposes is more of the same.

As was reported earlier here on Wake up America, Obama has presided over a "particularly slow recovery" and that is a direct quote from the June 2012 Federal Reserve Bulletin.

Then he makes a boneheaded gaffe about the private sector doing fine, showing that he has not a clue about what the problem is, so how can he fix it?

To the rescue come his party faithfuls attempting to explain, well what he meant was, in comparison to public sector.

That ridiculous explanation was blown out of the water when the Department of Labor's very own numbers were highlighted showing that public sector unemployment is average 4.2 percent.

Via Washington Post, mentioned here in a previous piece that day:

Obama and Reid have it precisely backward: It’s the public sector that’s doing fine. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for government workers last month was just 4.2 percent (up slightly from 3.9 percent a year ago). Compare that to private-sector industries such as construction (14.2 percent unemployment), leisure and hospitality services (9.7 percent), agriculture (9.5 percent), professional and business services (8.5 percent) and wholesale and retail trade (8.1 percent). As Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute points out, the public-sector unemployment rate “is the lowest of any industry or class of worker, even including the growing energy industry.” If the rest of Americans enjoyed the same unemployment rate as government workers, Obama would be cruising to reelection.

Meanwhile, the private sector continues to struggle under the weight of Obamacare, the spiraling national debt, the $46 billion in annual costs of the new regulations imposed by Obama, and the looming threat of “taxmageddon” — when, come January 2013, the private economy will get hit with hundreds of billions in higher taxes.

On top of everything else that Dana Milbanks refers to as "The Pileup at the White House", he explains that in Washington "there is a creeping sense that the bottom has fallen out and that there may be no second term," and that privately, senior Obama advisers do not see economic improvement on the horizon.

It has not been just a bad month for Obama or a bad year, it has been a bad three-and-a-half years and it all comes down to his own agenda, policies and failures.