When the President delivered his 2012 budget to Congress the media shouted “$1.1 trillion in cuts!”  Did this mean the government would spend $1.1 Trillion less?  Nope.  As the chart at the bottom of this article shows, Obama’s own budget calls for ten years of continuous spending increases.

Decoding the “information” in the media 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.  The size of those increases is based on additional assumptions.

Often, when a President or Senator speaks of “deficit reduction,” he does not mean the total, bottom line deficit will be less in the future than it is today.  His precise meaning is that the 2 or 5 or 10 year deficit prediction on the latest piece of paper from the White House is less than on the previous piece of paper.  Or, he means the amount a particular department or program will contribute to the deficit is predicted to be less on the new piece of paper.

A perfect example of this deception can be found in Obama’s budget numbers for “overseas contingency operations,” code for Iraq and Afghanistan.

• The most expensive year for Iraq and Afghanistan combined was $185 billion in 2008.
• In 2010 the cost was $167 billion.
• The Administration has budgeted $165 billion for 2011 and $127 billion for 2012.

The Iraq operation is scheduled to end, with all US troops leaving this year, 2011. The Afghanistan operation has never been as large or expensive as Iraq and reductions in troop strength and cost are now scheduled to begin in 2014.  If all goes according to plan there will be virtually no US troops left in Afghanistan after 2016.

Yet, as the table to the right shows the Obama budget, under Overseas Contingency Operations, projects more than a trillion in “deficit reduction” for years 2012 – 2021.  This is because they first asserted a baseline assumption that the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan would increase every year from now through 2021, even though they knew it would not.  Then, they subtracted what they believe will be real, declining cost each year, probably reaching near zero by 2016.

Thus, they can now magically report “deficit reduction” of $136 billion in 2021, ten years after the last American soldier will have left Iraq and five years after the end of the Afghanistan operation.

Through repetition in the zombie media they can plant in the mind of the public a perception that there will be some sort of “cut” in spending.

As the chart below shows, the Obama budget document shows continuous annual increases in total government spending at the same time war spending winds down.

Obama’s budget projects declining deficits in 2012 through 2015 only by also projecting enormous tax increases.

More than four decades ago, this nation stood up for the principle that after a lifetime of hard work, our seniors should not be left to struggle with a pile of medical bills in their later years. That is how Medicare was born. And it remains a sacred trust that must be passed down from one generation to the next. That is why not a dollar of the Medicare trust fund will be used to pay for this plan.

This was a deliberate deception.   Obama knows the so-called Medicare trust fund is a sham, that it doesn’t exist.

ObamaCare

For decades Social Security and Medicare payroll tax revenues coming into the Treasury have been greater than payouts for social security and Medicare benefits.   Congress has always spent the difference, called “surplus,”  on everything else government funds.

On paper there are Social Security and Medicare “trust funds,” but they hold no cash.  Congress directs the Treasury Department to maintain ledgers supporting the fiction that these two  programs are somehow owed the billions in surplus revenue that was spent on other programs since the Seventies.  The paper trust funds exist only to support the illusion that the government owes Billions to itself.

Beginning this year Medicare tax revenue will be less than Medicare payouts, transforming Medicare from a source of “surplus” for Congress to spend on other programs, to a net drain on the Treasury.  To make up the difference Congress will have to appropriate money from other sources.   There are only three ways for the government to acquire the cash to meet the Medicare shortfall:

• Increase taxes,
• Cut spending somewhere else
• Borrow more money from investors, including foreign governments

These are the same three options government would have if there were no on-paper trust fund.  Thus, the trust fund is proved to be political fiction created to dupe Americans into believing money was being “set aside” to fund the future needs of Social Security and Medicare.

Obama’s promise that “not a dollar of the Medicare trust fund” would be spent to support “The Plan” was meaningless.    Seniors who paid the Medicare tax all their lives in exchange for the promise of Medicare benefits are concerned about the real question: will Congress reduce Medicare benefits to fund other parts of ObamaCare?  If you read the legislation and believe your lying eyes, the answer is yes.

The lesson in all of this is that Congress should not be allowed to enact Unconstitutional programs like Medicare, that inevitably become financial time-bombs.   Working Americans now face the impossible financial burden of tens of millions of seniors who are or soon will be eligible for Medicare and have been taxed all their lives to pay for the promise of  health care.  There’s no way to extricate America from this moral and financial trap without causing a great deal of pain.

What’s Obama’s solution?  Expand government’s health care burden and make the same unsustainable promise not just to seniors, but to everyone!   And fund the new program in part by breaking the Medicare promise of the past 44 years.

And, we’re told,  all the countries that rank higher have so-called “universal health care” managed and paid for by government.

ObamaCare supporters hope we’ll assume this means patients get better care and enjoy better outcomes in 36 other countries where health care is more socialized than here in the US.  They don’t disclose the most important information, that the WHO ranking criteria are mostly about how health care is organized, financed and “distributed,”  not about quality of care, competency of physicians, success rates for treatments, or any other criteria that would actually matter.

The WHO survey is based on five weighted components:

• Health Level (weight: 25%)

• Responsiveness  (weight: 12.5%)

• Responsiveness Distribution (weight 12.5%)

• Health Distribution: (weight: 25%)

• Financial Fairness (weight 25%)

Health Level is “Disability adjusted life expectancy.” America ranks 24th.  This component blames a nation’s “health care system” for everything that affects life expectancy statistics, including substance abuse, obesity, accidents, suicide, homicide, risky sex, smoking, etc.  America is statistically worse than other nations in several of these, but that doesn’t mean there is something wrong with health insurance or hospitals or physicians.  The WHO criteria effectively blames Blue Cross when a smoker dies before his time, or a teen is murdered by a drug gang.  Researchers have found that America would rank number one in the world in this category if deaths due to accidents and homicides were factored out.

Responsiveness includes what most people would consider valid measures of health care quality: choices of doctors, speed and quality of medical services, and hospital cleanliness.  America ranks number one in the world in this component.

Responsiveness Distribution measures inequality of responsiveness.  If almost everyone in country X experiences grade D Responsiveness it will score higher than the the US where a most patients experience grade A or B responsiveness, with a few experiencing grade C.  Because WHO is driven by socialist principles, it finds inequality less tolerable than horrible health care.

Health Distribution and Financial Fairness are both about how a country’s “system” is organized and paid for.  The greater the role of government, the higher the rating in these two components.   These components do not consider the quality or availability of medical services.  WHO simply asserts that a government managed and financed “system,” especially based on steeply progressive taxation is “better.”

So here are the facts:

• Sixty Two percent of WHO’s survey weight is based on components that have nothing to do with the quality of care.  America ranks low in these components because most of our population pays for medical services privately, through private insurance plans.  If the federal government directly supervised and paid for all health care, America would earn the maximum score for these components.
  

• America scores number one in the world in the component most directly based on the quality of health care.  But that component is only 12.5% of the total survey weight.

• A country with lower quality care, with longer waiting times, with less competent physicians, and with worse medical outcomes than America, will rank higher than America in the WHO survey if  its government runs and pays for health care for all or nearly all its citizens.
  

By the same reasoning WHO would conclude that groceries purchased with food stamps were “better” than groceries purchased with one’s own money.

By the same reasoning WHO would rate the French military “better” than the American military, because the tax system that pays for it is more steeply progressive.

When Obama and the government-media complex team up with the international socialists who run the UN and it’s World Health Organization to cite America’s rank of 37 they are attempting to sell ObamaCare with yet another deception.

1. The “Bush tax cuts” passed in 2001 and 2003 lowered all the tax bracket rates.  But in order to win enough votes in the Senate Bush had to agree to a catch.

2. The catch, Under the law enacted in 2003, is that those Bush tax bracket rates are temporary.   If Congress does not act to change the law, the temporary rates will expir, and beginning in 2011 all the brackets will go back up to the the previous rates.

This chart shows the current tax rate brackets, and what they go up to in 2011 if Congress does not act to change the law.

John McCain’s tax proposals start with changing the law to make the current “temporary” rate brackets permanent – all of them.

Barack Obama’s proposal is to change the law to make only the lowest four brackets permanent, and allow the top two brackets to increase.

For several years, Democrats who opposed the lower rates have deceptively called Congressional action that would keep them the same in 2011 as they are now “a new round of tax cuts.”  Democrats have claimed that inaction that allowed the rates to go up  would not be a tax increase since there would be no change in the law.

Republicans have said that Congressional action to keep the rates the same in 2011 as they are now simply maintains the status quo, while inaction that allowed the rates to go up would be a tax increase.

Desperate to find fault with McCain’s proposal to make all the current rates permanent, Barack Obama now says keeping the rates the same for all the brackets constitutes a new tax cut, but only for the top two brackets!

This is how Obama justifies his claim that McCain would give new tax cuts to the rich but not to anyone else.

In The Big Speech In The Stadium last week Barack Obama once again attempted to deceive voters regarding John McCain’s views.  He said:

Now, I don’t believe that Senator McCain doesn’t care what’s going on in the lives of Americans; I just think he doesn’t know.  Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under $5 million a year?

Obama hoped listener reaction would be something like: “…John McCain thinks that?  Wow, how out of touch can anyone be?”

This deception comes from an answer McCain gave to a question in The Saddleback Church Civil Forum where both candidates answered questions on a range of issues.

Here, directly from the transcript are the actual words of Pastor Rick Warren who asked the question, and John McCain who gave the answer:

Pastor Warren asked:

OK, on taxes, define “rich.” Everybody talks about taxing the rich, but not the poor, the middle class. At what point — give me a number, give me a specific number — where do you move from middle class to rich?  Is it $100,000, is it $50,000, is it $200,000? How does anybody know if we don’t know what the standards are?

John McCain answered:

Some of the richest people I’ve ever known in my life are the most unhappy. I think that rich should be defined by a home, a good job, an education and the ability to hand to our children a more prosperous and safer world than the one that we inherited.

I don’t want to take any money from the rich — I want everybody to get rich.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE]

I don’t believe in class warfare or re-distribution of the wealth. But I can tell you, for example, there are small businessmen and women who are working 16 hours a day, seven days a week that some people would classify as — quote — “rich,” my friends, and want to raise their taxes and want to raise their payroll taxes.

Let’s keep taxes low. Let’s give every family in America a $7,000 tax credit for every child they have. Let’s give them a $5,000 refundable tax credit to go out and get the health insurance of their choice. Let’s not have the government take over the health care system in America.

So, I think if you are just talking about income, how about $5 million?

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

…The point is that I’m trying to make here, seriously — and I’m sure that comment will be distorted — but the point is that we want to keep people’s taxes low and increase revenues.

It’s obvious from the transcript, and it’s even more obvious on the video, that “$5 Million” was a sarcastic quip, not McCain’s definition of the middle class.

As McCain predicted, Barack Obama did distort, in what will be the most watched speech of the campaign.

If, as Democrats always claim, voters believe all Republicans are hopelessly out of touch with the middle class, why did Barack Obama believe he had to stoop to a deliberate deception?

In the previous post below we examined Senator Obama’s use of distractions to avoid direct answers to direct questions from Fox News Interviewer, Chris Wallace. In this post are some examples of how Obama talks like a politician, with cynical, politically motivated deceptions.

Mr. Wallace challenged Obama to demonstrate that he really is the “unifier” he claims to be rather than the hardened partisan he appears to be from his limited voting record: “As a president, can you name a hot button issue where you would be willing to cross Democratic party lines and say Republicans have a better idea here?”

Obama responded that back in the 60s and 70s Republicans had a better approach to regulating business. Obviously, that answer provides no useful information for voters in 2008.

Teachers Unions

Obama went on to claim he had defied his party’s most entrenched special interest, the teachers unions. If accurate, this claim certainly would be noteworthy. Obama said,

“We should be experimenting with different ways of compensating teachers…”

Wallace interrupted: “you mean merit pay?” Obama answered:

“Well, merit pay, the way it has been designed, based on just a single standardized test, I think is a big mistake, because the way we measure performance may be skewed by whether or not the kids are coming in the school already three years or four years behind.”

“But I think that having assessment tools and then saying, you know what, teachers who are on career paths to become better teachers, developing themselves professionally, that we should pay more.”

Senator Obama criticized “a single standardized test.” Does this mean he favors more thorough testing? Nope. He offered no ideas to improve the testing regime.

He formed a misleading sentence by hooking the phrase “having assessment tools” together with the idea of paying more to teachers who “are on career paths to become better teachers…”

Including the first phrase is a deliberate attempt to deceive because the rest of the sentence describes the existing, union-supported pay scheme that does not factor in student test results. In most states teachers are already given pay increases for what the unions say makes them “better,” earning additional college credits and spending additional time on the job. The most successful teachers get no recognition and no more pay than mediocre teachers with equivalent seniority and college credits.

This whole exchange is nothing but slick politics-speak. Obama claims to be bucking the politically powerful union when in fact he’s willfully promoting the union’s agenda. He disparages the only existing tool to measure how effective teachers are, testing their students. He offers no alternative to measure student learning so that more effective teachers can be paid more. He affirms the status quo, automatic pay increases for time on the job and additional eductation, without regard for teaching success

Consider this excerpt from the Teacher Union web site:

“We need a fairer and more accurate accountability system that gives credit to schools that started further behind but are making real progress. Any additional indicators used to assess student learning and school performance should be helpful, not harmful; and they should not lead to more testing.

“The legislation should not impose new and unnecessary requirements on teachers and paraprofessionals, and should not include a federal mandate to use test scores to evaluate teachers for incentive or performance pay. Including a new federal mandate for evaluating teacher performance would take us in the wrong direction.”

The casual listener to Fox News might get the impression that Obama favors merit pay for more effective teachers. In truth, the teacher union is against merit pay based on success in teaching students, and so is Obama.