In only four years the President and the Democrats have made amazing progress toward realizing the progressive dream of a powerful central government, controlling every corner of the economy and dominating the states and The People.  The only thing holding them back is the Republican House majority, supported by popular resistance to deficit spending and the alarming rise in government debt. 

The deadline to prevent sequester or $85 billion in “cuts” which are actually reductions in the rate of spending growth, was March 1.  President Obama proposed the sequester in 2011.  It was a tactic to defer discussion of spending cuts until after the election.   For various reasons it hasn’t worked out the way he hoped and at the last minute he desperately tried to prevent it.  He has held several campaign style events, issuing ominous predictions of misery and mayhem if Republicans in Congress don’t submit to his demand for new legislation that would cancel the sequester cuts and impose tax increases.

For example, Obama claimed that as a result of sequester “thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off.”

Because voters tell pollsters that Education is one of their higher priorities, the President talks about education in virtually every public appearance.  However Education is not a federal government function.  It’s a local government service and is paid for almost entirely by state and local taxes, not federal money.  Here’s the math:

• In 2012 States and local governments spent $778 billion on Education. 
• The federal government added $29 billion in various subsidies and grants for a total of $808 billion.
• According to a report published by the White House sequester will cut the federal share of education funding by $2 billion, reducing the total from $808 to $806 billion or 2 tenths of one percent.
• Even that incremental reduction overstates the impact of the cuts because most federal money funds ancillary programs, not the salaries of classroom teachers.  Mr. Obama uses the Education establishment’s term “educator” in place of of the word “bureaucrat,” to describe the people who supposedly help children learn by working in office buildings far from any classroom.
• After the sequester cut federal primary and secondary education spending will still be 28% more than in 2008, the year before the Obama spending surge began.

The President warned that sequester cuts to the National Institutes of Health would “set back medical science for a generation.”

Wow!  That’s sounds awful.  But most medical research is done by the private sector, not the federal government.  And according to the White House Sequester report Mr. Obama’s doomsday warning is absurd. The National Institutes of Health are scheduled to spend $34.3 billion in 2013.  Their share of  sequester cuts would be $2.5 billion, leaving $31.7 billion.  That’s 3% less than in 2012 but 9% more than 2008.

In a campaign style event on Tuesday Mr. Obama described the sequester as arbitrary, brutal, meat cleaver,  and issued several more threats including,

• “Emergency responders ability to help their communities through disasters will be degraded.”  But like teachers, police and fire departments are funded almost entirely by state and local government.
• “border patrol agents will see hours reduced”
• “Cutbacks to air traffic control and airport security”
• “Hundreds of thousands will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings.”

Then he added what could be described as a veiled threat against The People if Republicans don’t pass legislation that cancels the sequester cuts and increases taxes:

• “FBI agents will be furloughed and Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go”

Really Mr. President?  Are you threatening to turn criminals loose on our streets if you don’t win your political fight in Washington? 

Here’s a textbook example of the continuous loop of failure that is government by the progressive political movement now led by Barack Obama.

In his State of the Union speech President Obama briefly assured us the deficit/debt problem was almost solved and then moved on.  He proposed lots of new government run programs and government spending that he called “investments,” including this:

Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road.  But today, fewer than 3 in 10 four year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program.  Most middle-class parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for a private preschool. So tonight, I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America.

This is a familiar, progressive formulation.  Start with the usual “study after study” to support what in this case is obvious, that it’s better for children to begin learning early.  Then try to piggyback a not so obvious conclusion that Washington politicians and bureaucrats, with their volumes of regulations and piles of money can reach into preschool rooms in Fargo, Kansas City, Denver and Chicago and ensure that 4 year old kids from diverse backgrounds all learn their letters and colors.  And the bonus for progressives would be an ideal opportunity to begin indoctrinating a future generation of voters in progressive dogma.

But the federal government already operates a nation-wide preschool system called Head Start. Yet Obama chose not to mention it.  Why?

Perhaps the answer lies in a meticulous study of Head Start results completed just two years ago by the staff of Obama’s own Department of Health and Human Services.  They tracked the progress of 5,000 children from low income families who were eligible for Head Start over several years.  Half were enrolled Head Start program, and the other half were a control group that did not attend Head Start.  An extensive battery of tests was run on both groups of children just before Kindergarten, at the end of Kindergarten and at the end of first grade.  It turned out that the Head Start group did not perform any better in Kindergarten and first grade than the control group.  Here’s a summary, directly from the HHS study:

[I]t appears that access to Head Start has an impact on 4-year-olds’ language and literacy skills while they are in Head Start, but these early gains are not sustained as the children develop and move into the early school years. Furthermore, there is no evidence of impacts on children’s math ability, pre-writing skills, or teacher assessments at the end of Head Start, at the end of kindergarten, or at the end of 1st grade. In other words, the children in the Head Start group ended their Head Start year with moderately higher skills than their counterparts in the control group, but this advantage did not lead to longer term gains when they were in school. At the end of 1st grade, they end up at the same point as the children who were not given access to the program.  Although both groups of children are making progress over time, in most instances, the Head Start group scores are not statistically different from the control group scores in kindergarten and 1st grade.

For decades politicians have routinely called on Congress to expand Head Start.  But with this study documenting failure in mind, Obama presented the issue as parents’ inability to pay for private preschool.  But that’s exactly the rationale that President Lyndon Johnson used back in the 1960s to sell Congress and the nation on Head Start!

Obama’s most recent budget proudly proclaimed an annual cost of $8.1 billion for Head Start “to serve approximately 962,000 children and families, maintaining the historic expansion undertaken in 2009–2010.”  That works out to about $8,400 per year, per child, not as much as the elite preschools the children of Washington officials attend, but well above the average charged by private preschools across the country.  Yet, after five decades Head Start graduates are no better prepared for school than children who didn’t attend any preschool.

The Constitution’s Tenth Amendment commands the President and Congress to restrict government’s power and reach only to those functions authorized by the Constitution.  Everything else is to be left to the States or to The People.  Operating preschools is definitely not authorized by the Constitution.  So, the failing Head Start program shouldn’t even exist. And there certainly is no Constitutional authorization for a second national preschool system!

Obama’s “reasoning” leaps from the truism that children should begin learning early to the conclusion that the federal government should provide and supervise that learning.  But there have always been successful sources of early childhood learning, from parents and grand parents, to siblings, to low cost and even free preschools, some organized by churches.  This is a textbook example of why we should accept the wisdom of the founders and not turn early education of precious little children over to the tender mercies of the federal bureaucracy.

During President Obama’s first four years the federal government ran deficits totaling $5.1 trillion, far and away the largest in history. 

Concern over the explosion in government debt caused by an apparent new normal of yawning deficits is a major barrier to the to the President’s agenda of dramatically expanded government power.  Thus, he opened his State of the Union speech with an attempt to minimize the significance of his deficits by claiming:

…we are more than halfway towards the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists say we need to stabilize our finances.  

He has made this assertion several times in recent weeks as part of three, creative bookkeeping steps:

1. Simply assert that $4 trillion in “deficit reduction” over ten or more years, or a theoretical average of $400 billion per year is enough, even though it’s less than a third of the government’s average $1.3 trillion deficit.
2. Claim to be “more than halfway” to $4 trillion in part by counting as “cuts” a trillion the government won’t spend from 2013 to 2021 on the Iraq war that ended in 2011, and from 2015 to 2021 on the Afghanistan war he promises will end next year.
3. Count recent tax hikes on top bracket tax payers, most of whom are business owners as a net income tax revenue increase of $65 billion per year from 2013 through 2021.

After brushing deficits aside the President turned to what he really cares about and what always bring cheers from his progressive base and the sympathetic media, expanding government’s power and reach.  He prefaced his list of marvelous, new ideas with this assurance:

…nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime.  It is not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth.

Following is a partial list of his ideas and proposals that somehow won’t cost the government anything and thus won’t “increase our deficit by a single dime:”

• A “network of 15 manufacturing hubs” where somehow “businesses will partner with” various government agencies to turn whole regions into “centers of high tech jobs.” 
• Increased “investments in science and innovation” to “reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race.”
• More “investments” in wind and solar energy.  Does he think we’ve already forgotten his previous “investments” in more than 30 companies, including Solyndra, SpectraWatt, Beacon Power, A123 Systems, Abound Solar, Mountain Plaza, Raser Technologies, and Stirling Energy Systems that went into bankruptcy, after squandering billions of taxpayer dollars?
• “I’m issuing a new goal for America: Let’s cut in half the energy wasted by our homes and businesses over the next 20 years.”  As we’ve seen for decades, this means subsidies, either in the form of direct cash payments or tax credits for installing insulation & retrofitting “green” stuff.
  
• A new jobs program that sounds an awful lot like the old “shovel ready” from 2009 “to put people to work on our most urgent repairs, like the nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country.”
• Funding preschool “for every single child in America”
• Redesign “all of America’s high schools so they better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy.”  Does “redesign” also include rebuilding?
  
• Tax credits to businesses that hire and invest.
  

One wonders, why not simply give tax and regulatory relief to all businesses so they’ll all be in a better position to hire and invest?

If it strikes you as preposterous that government can accomplish even one item from the President’s fanciful wishlist and not “increase our deficit by a single dime” maybe you’re just too much of a slave to common sense.

President Obama has invented a new name one of Washington’s most enduring deceptions, the promise of spending cuts in return for tax increases.  He calls it his “balanced approach.”  As always the tax increases are real and immediate while the spending cuts turn out to be illusory.

The President wants to rescind the Sequester spending cuts he signed into law in 2011 but can’t without cooperation from House Republicans.  His way of inviting their support is to demand that they postpone the cuts while enacting more tax increases.  At his recent Sequester media event he said:

Economists and business leaders from across the spectrum have said that our economy is poised for progress in 2013 and we’ve seen signs of this over the last several weeks [...] we’ve created more than 6-million jobs in the last 35-months.

Whenever Obama’s ideas conflict with common sense he claims to have the blessing of unnamed experts, in this case “economists and business leaders.”  This is a textbook logical fallacy called “appeal to authority” used by those whose case is too weak to stand the reality test. 

Back in 2010 the President agreed with Republicans to postpone tax increases citing the weak economy.  Obama may see “signs” but the economy, as measured by quarterly GDP growth is clearly weaker now than it was in 2010.  In fact, it turned negative in the final quarter of 2012.  Yet he is determined to increase taxes again.

Upon examination of the data it turns out that Obama’s six million jobs in 35 months is the weakest post-recession labor market since the government began it’s monthly survey of employers in 1939.

The Sequester is a series of spending reductions scheduled for the next ten years that are considered draconian and unacceptable in Washington.  It’s openly stated purpose was to scare the President and Congress into negotiating different cuts that were not so draconian. Obama told the assembled reporters:

The proposals that I’ve put forward during the fiscal cliff negotiations, in discussions with Speaker Boehner and others, are still very much on the table.  I repeat; the deals that I put forward, the balanced approach of spending cuts and entitlement reform and tax reform that I put forward are still on the table.

“Tax reform” is the President’s new euphemism for tax increases, which are beginning to lose their appeal to the public.  Congress and the President avoided the fiscal cliff with last minute legislation that postponed the sequester until March 1 and increased tax rates on high income taxpayers.  Democrats praised Obama as the fiscal cliff “winner” for cleverly forcing the Republicans to submit to his tax increase demand while stiffing them by reneging on his promise of “balance” via spending cuts. 

Obama now declares more tax increases and “cuts” are still “on the table.”  But nobody knows what his cuts are.  They exist only as smooth chatter for the TV cameras, not as written legislation with numbers that the House and Senate could debate and vote on. 

So we’ve been reminded that while it’s critical for us to cut wasteful spending, we can’t just cut our way to prosperity.

The converse of “we can’t cut our way to prosperity” would have to be we can spend our way to prosperity.  But if government spending were the source of prosperity Obama’s record shattering spending increase should have produced record shattering, or at least above average growth.  Instead we’ve seen the weakest post-recession economy ever recorded since the government began quarterly assessments of economic growth in 1948.

Under the law the President is required to submit his annual budget proposals to Congress by February 1.  This year he instead submitted notice that his budget would be delayed.  So the only Presidential spending proposals in writing are found in last year’s budget documents, displayed in the chart below.  Whatever is “on the table” is invisible. 

The labor Department reported the unemployment rate ticked up from 7.8% to 7.9% in January.  Most of the media marched in lockstep with the White House, emphasizing the other headline statistic, 157,000 jobs created in January.  While not enough to keep up with population growth that number was, as the loyal reporters chanted, “moving in the right direction.”

But it turns out that January’s small increase in the unemployment rate dramatically understates the depth of misery being caused by America’s unrelenting jobs crisis. [continued below the chart]

Barely mentioned in media reports was the reclassification of 170,000 people from “unemployed” to “not in the labor force” in one month, January.

• The Labor Force is the sum of all persons who have jobs, plus all who are officially classified by government criteria as “unemployed.”
  
• The labor force participation rate is the percentage of all working age adults who are officially counted as “in the labor force.”

The chart above tracks both the officially reported unemployment rate and what would be the “actual” unemployment rate each month if the labor force participation rate had remained the same since the Obama Administration began.

Today, there are millions of people who want jobs but don’t officially qualify as “unemployed” by government criteria and are thus not included in the monthly count of “unemployed workers.”  We know this to be true because the participation rate has steadily declined from 65.7% in January 2009 to 63.6% in January 2013.

Not including all unemployed people in the labor force artificially lowers the official unemployment rate.

The recent sharp decline in labor force participation is unprecedented.  From  2009 through 2012 is the worst four year period since the government began calculating the labor force participation rate in 1948. [Continued below the chart]

The second chart places the labor force participation rate into context by tracking it over the last three decades.

• During the boom years of the Reagan Administration expanding employment opportunities drew millions of new people into the labor force.  The participation rate went up at the same time the unemployment rate went down.
  
• Over the next 16 years the participation rate tracked within a narrow range between 66% and 67%.
• After the end of 2008 labor force participation dropped precipitously as employment opportunities disappeared and more than five million people became discouraged and quit seeking jobs often enough for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to count them as “unemployed.”  The unemployment rate came down only because labor force participation declined.
  

The media have all but ignored this dramatic deterioration in employment statistics, presenting a very gradual, decline in the official unemployment rate as good news, without explaining that it covers up bad news.

Another month of anemic job growth as the weakest post-recession job market ever recorded grinds on.

Employers added 157,000 jobs in January, fewer than needed to keep up with growth in the working age population and replace the jobs lost during the recession.   The unemployment rate ticked up from 7.8% to 7.9% and has hovered slightly above or below 8% for a year.  To put that in perspective consider that the average rate in 2007, the last year before the recession was 4.6%.

At the White House Press Secretary Carney excused anemic job growth with the same overwrought language we’ve heard ever month for two years:

When this President took office in 2009 we were… in economic free fall. We were losing – we were hemorrhaging jobs at something like three quarters of a million jobs per month.  And, the hole dug by that recession in jobs terms was more than eight and one-half million.

Actually 8.7 million jobs were lost in 2008 and 2009.  Because the recovery has been so anemic 40% of those lost jobs still have not been replaced.  If job growth continues at the January pace it will take until September 2014 just to replace the jobs lost in 2008 and 2009.  But even then the crisis won’t be over because the adult, working age population will have grown by almost 12 million people and two-thirds of them will need jobs.

But more importantly, as the chart above shows every previous period of job loss resolved to a new period of job growth, no matter who was President or what the government did.  But in 2013 we continue to endure the worst post-recession job market ever recorded since the labor Department began it’s monthly survey of employers 74 years ago.

After three years of inadequate growth the economy contracted during the final months of 2012. GDP turned negative by 0.1% during the fourth quarter.

After the Commerce Department issued it’s quarterly GDP report the White House tried to present a deteriorating economic indicator in positive terms:

This was the first quarterly drop in real GDP in three-and-a-half years. Over the last fourteen quarters, the economy has expanded by 7.5 percent overall[...]  During the four quarters of 2012, real GDP grew by 1.5 percent, the third consecutive year of economic expansion.  Over this period, real GDP growth has been led by an expansion in the private sector.

This chart provides context for the numbers cited by the White House.The White House hopes it’s statistics will seem impressive to people who don’t have the time or inclination to study the data on their own.  But as the chart shows we’re suffering through the worst post-recession economy ever recorded.  The chart tracks each post-recession period the same way the White House measures the current economy, beginning at the first quarter of positive growth.

For more than three years the President and his media supporters have told us that the end of the recession proves his policies of massively expanded government borrowing, spending and regulatory control over the economy “worked.”  But there has never been a recession that didn’t end, no matter what the government did or didn’t do.  And in fact, this current post-recession recovery is the weakest ever recorded since the government began tracking quarterly GDP growth in 1946

The chart below shows spending increases during each of the ten recessions that came before the post-recession periods tracked in the chart above.  While this data alone doesn’t conclusively prove excessive spending is holding back the current recovery it clearly debunks the notion that the recession could not have ended without his tsunami of new spending.

The White House message says “GDP growth has been led by an expansion in the private sector.”  But the private sector always leads GDP growth.  Without a productive private sector to tax there can be no government at all.

On January 4, 2012 President Obama appointed three strongly pro-union members to the five member National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).  The Board functions like a court, arbitrating disputes between unions and employers.

One of the disputes Obama’s Board members considered in 2012 was Noel Canning, a Pepsi-Cola bottler Vs the Teamsters union.   As the President expected the Board found in the union’s favor. 

But Noel Canning appealed the ruling to the US Court of Appeals, D.C. circuit claiming that the Board acted without the required quorum because three of it’s members were appointed in an Unconstitutional manner.

NLRB members are appointed by the President and must be confirmed by the Senate, the same process the Constitution sets forth for Cabinet Secretaries and federal judges.  The Constitution also authorizes a President to make appointments without Senate confirmation if the Senate is in recess and thus unavailable to conduct its confirmation process.

The Senate had declared itself to be in session on January 4, not in recess.  However most of the Senators were out of Washington on holiday break and the few who remained conducted very brief “pro-forma” sessions on some days and no business at all on other days.  President Obama asserted authority to make recess appointments based on his opinion the Senate was actually in recess.

But The Court agreed with Noel Canning that the President violated the Constitution because he appointed and installed the three NLRB members without the required Senate Confirmation.

The Court’s reasoning couldn’t be more compelling.  The Constitution grants the President the power to make appointments without Senate Confirmation only during “THE Recess,” which is established, described and required every other year by the Constitution itself.  Not only that, the vacancies being filled have to “happen” or occur during the same bi-annual recess.  That is, the person previously holding the position must have resigned during the recess.

The court acknowledged that during each two year Congressional session the House and Senate recess many times.  They recess at the end of each day.  They recess for weekends and holidays.  They recess for lunch.   But none of these “intra-session” recesses qualifies as “THE” inter-session recess” established by the Constitution.

The Court found that Obama’s interpretation of the Constitution’s recess appointments clause was an abuse of his power, and that based on his reasoning no appointment would ever have to be confirmed by the Senate as long as he announced it on a Sunday or during the Senate’s lunch break.

While the media have sought to portray this case as a spat between Republicans in the Senate wanting their way and the President wanting his way, the Court was refreshingly non-partisan and solidly based on the clear language of the Constitution:

The Senate’s desires do not determine the Constitution’s meaning.  The Constitution’s separation of powers features, of which the Appointments Clause is one, do not simply protect one branch from another.  These structural provisions serve to protect the people, for it is ultimately the people’s rights that suffer when one branch encroaches on another.

As Madison explained in Federalist No. 51, the division of power between the branches forms part of the “security [that] arises to the rights of the people.”  Or as the Supreme Court held in Freytag, “The structural interests protected by the Appointments Clause are not those of any one branch of Government but of the entire Republic.”

The straw man is a logical fallacy, an attempt to appear to have won an argument by misrepresenting the opposing argument, or by knocking down an argument the opposition did not make.  President Obama is a devoted fan of straw men, having stood up and then batted down hundreds during his speeches and his recent campaign. 

Here are Barack Obama’s Second Inaugural Straw Men

We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few.

We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.

Whose belief is that? Not the Republicans’ belief.  Did Romney campaign on such an assertion?

…what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names.

It is a principle of the Conservative/Libertarian ideology Obama opposes, that Americans are unique in being bound together NOT by ethnicity or religion like most other nations throughout history, but by ideas, the timeless principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence.  There is certainly no politician or academic today who declares us to be bound together by the colors of our skin.

The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob.

No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores.

…enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.

We cannot…treat name-calling as reasoned debate.

The next crisis deadline is already upon us.  Over the past 16 months the Obama Administration has borrowed and spent another $2 trillion (in addition to $3.4 trillion in tax revenue) and has once again reached it’s debt ceiling.  The Obama-friendly media continue to repeat the falsehood that the President and the Democrats have already implemented spending cuts.

At his recent press conference President Obama fired his opening salvo in the debt ceiling debate, a combination of gibberish and deception wrapped in words that seemed to be about government accounting.

The old I Love Lucy show used variations on the same gag over and over. Rickey discovers that Lucy bought an expensive new dress and complains that he can’t afford it.  “But,” Lucy protests, “the dress didn’t cost anything!  I paid for it with the money I saved when I bought a new coat on sale.”

Through six years of almost continuous campaigning President Obama has developed a rhetorical formula that wraps Lucy’s reasoning in political buzz words.  The most recent example, his press conference comments on the government’s exploding debt and the looming debt ceiling dispute began with:

We are poised for a good year if we make smart decisions and sound investments, and as long as Washington politics don’t get in the way of America’s progress.

Understanding Obama’s remarks starts with a brief vocabulary primer.

“Investment” is Obama’s word for what the rest of us call government spending.  His goal is more, not less spending.

“Washington politics” is any Congressional resistance to limitless annual deficits and record-shattering rates of growth in government debt.

“America’s progress” is more centralized power in the federal government, more spending and higher taxes.

Obama’s remarks continued:

As I said on the campaign, one component to growing our economy and broadening opportunity for the middle class is shrinking our deficits in a balanced and responsible way.

So far, so good.  Government can’t continue to run trillion dollar deficits forever without causing a financial crisis that will be disastrous to the middle class.  So shrinking government deficits is imperative to maintaining the standard of living of the American middle class.

And for nearly two years now, I’ve been fighting for such a plan — one that would reduce our deficits by $4 trillion over the next decade, which would…make [the debt] manageable so it doesn’t crowd out the investments we need to make in people and education and job training and science and medical research — all the things that help us grow.

The ladies and gentlemen of the White House Press play along and pretend this makes sense.  But In the real world it’s gibberish – nonsense.  He contradicts himself by promising “manageable” debt and more spending on his “investments.”  Obama always offsets words about reducing deficits with words about even more “investments.”  This rhetorical strategy is calibrated to be reassuring to listeners who are concerned about deficits and his progressive base that always wants government to spend and do more.  He then said:

Now, step by step we’ve made progress toward that goal.  Over the past two years, I’ve signed into law about $1.4 trillion in spending cuts.

Decoding this claim starts with understanding two key words in government budgeting:

• “baseline” and,

• “assumptions.”

The baseline is projected spending over the next ten years.  The baseline numbers result from a set of assumptions, starting with the assumption that almost every government department, agency and program will receive an automatic budget increase every year. 

As most people know, in Washington, the term “spending cut” rarely means government will spend less in the future than the present.  It means the 5 or 10 year prediction in the latest forecast from the White House shows a tiny bit smaller increase in spending than the previous forecast.

But Obama’s claim to have already “cut” over a trillion is more deceptive than even the usual Washington game of incremental reductions in the rate of spending growth.  The fine print behind his “cuts” are in his budget line item for “overseas contingency operations,” code for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Iraq war ended and all US troops left in 2011. The Afghanistan operation was never as large or expensive as Iraq and reductions in troop strength are underway, with virtually all troops scheduled to pull out by next year. 

Yet, as the table to the right shows the Obama budget, under Overseas Contingency Operations, asserts more than a trillion in “spending cuts” for years 2012 – 2021 from not continuing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  This is most of the $1.4 trillion in cuts the President claimed in his press conference.

These fictitious “cuts” result from the White House budget office starting with a baseline assumption that the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan would increase every year through 2021, even though they knew there would be no cost at all after 2014.  Then, they tallied “savings” from recognizing reality that the Iraq operation ended nearly two years ago and Afghanistan will end in 2014.

Thus, the President now reports a “spending cut” of $136 billion in 2021, ten years after the last American soldier left Iraq and six years after the scheduled end of the Afghanistan operation.  If Not spending on a war that has ended qualifies as “cuts” then why not claim even more cuts from ending World War II, Korea and Vietnam wars?

The rest of his claimed $1.4 trillion in “cuts” is based on the assumption that not borrowing a trillion for Iraq and Afghanistan will save billions in interest.

Through repetition in the zombie media Obama plants in the mind of the public the perception that he has already “cut” spending.   But, as the chart above shows, Obama’s most recent budget document shows record-breaking annual increases in total government spending at the same time actual war spending winds down.

The spending increase during Obama’s first term was greater than any previous period since mobilization for the Korean War in the early 1950s.  His own budget calls for an even greater spending increase in his second term.

One more quote from Obama’s press conference:

Two weeks ago, I signed into law more than $600 billion in new revenue, by making sure the wealthiest Americans begin to pay their fair share. 

The revenue estimate is a grand total for ten years.  The number that counts, the amount of additional revenue to be produced this year, probably won’t be more than $50 billion, even if the President’s ten year forecast turns out to be accurate.  But in the same Fiscal Cliff bill that enacted this tax increase is new spending and tax credits for politically connected corporations that will will more than offset the additional revenue.  As a result of the fiscal cliff bill total deficits will go up, not down.

The President does not speak in coherent accounting terms.  His words are not meant to inform.  They are meant to deceive.