Critics of President Obama’s deficit reduction speech called it the opening of his 2012 reelection campaign rather than a serious, sober presentation of the problem and proposed solutions.  We agree. He began by praising big government for all its varied taxpayer funded functions.  He then fixed blame for recent massive deficits and the looming debt [...]

Congressional Democrats and their supporters are alarmed by any discussion of spending cuts and are trying to convince us it would be disastrous to “slash” 2011 spending from $3.819 trillion projected by the Obama Administration all the way down to $3.759 trillion proposed by the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives. Since the [...]

Much of the media’s “information” about the federal budget is deception made possible by the arcane budgeting process in Congress.  President Obama didn’t invent the process.  But he’s an enthusiastic practitioner of the deception. When the President delivered his 2012 budget to Congress the media shouted “$1.1 trillion in cuts!”  Did this mean the government [...]

The spending cuts are accounting flimflam. The record breaking increase in tax revenue is fantasy. At his press conference Tuesday President Obama hoped to plant the perception in the mind of the public that his 2012 budget was an exercise in frugality.  Here’s one of his responses to budget questions: …this is my third budget. [...]

President Obama tries to deceive The People with a meaningless comparison to the Eisenhower era. During the press conference he held to defend his 2012 budget President Obama claimed: As a start, [my budget] freezes domestic discretionary spending over the next five years, which would cut the deficit by more than $400 billion over the [...]

Among several preposterous assertions made by President Obama in his Tuesday press conference was this: When I took office, I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term. Our budget meets that pledge… None of the assembled reporters disputed or asked for clarification.    This chart helps tell the [...]

On Tuesday President Obama held a news conference.  In response to the first question about the 2012 budget he delivered to Congress on Monday the President made an astounding assertion: 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 [...]

The men and women of the pro-Obama, political-media establishment are in a funk.  They and their smartest-President-ever were humiliated by the voters in the mid-term tsunami. They’ve begun to coalesce around an excuse to insulate them from the grim reality: The voters were stupid and misinformed.  Typical is Sara Seltzer’s column at AlterNet, “16 of [...]

Austin Goolsbee, Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers appears in another, white board video at the White House web site,  this time talking down to us about jobs.  (Commentary on his first video is here.) The purpose of Goolsbee’s presentation is to persuade us that the failure of the Obama stimulus to [...]

Austin Goolsbee, Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, appears in a video on the White House website to deliver a witless, condescending tutorial on taxes.   It’s condescending toward you,  the productive people who actually do the work, take the risks, and invest the capital that generates the taxable wages, taxable profits, and [...]