News this morning about President Obama’s decision to sign the budget despite potentially breaking a campaign pledge about earmarks is fairly unremarkable – he’s broken quite a few already.
But what is remarkable about this story are the comments from Obama’s advisers, Peter Orszag and Rahm Emanuel, further down in the article. “This is last year’s business,” said Orszag. “We just want to move on. Let’s get this bill done, get it into law and move forward.”
Emanuel was a little more direct as to whose feet the administration will be laying this before – “First, this is a $1.7 trillion deficit he inherited. Let's be clear about that. We inherited this deficit and we inherited $4 trillion of new debt," Emanuel said. “That is the facts.”
These comments would appear to signal a concerted PR effort among Obama’s advisers to paint the staggering budget deficits as a legacy of the Bush Administration to counteract republican efforts to draw attention to potentially damaging long-term effects of the deficit on the economy. An interesting strategy if they can pull it off.
But just how exactly does one inherit $4 trillion of new debt?
Monday, March 2, 2009
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2 comments:
"But just how exactly does one inherit $4 trillion of new debt?"
Easy - The New Math!
Precisely. And as Krauthammer pointed out yesterday, do you notice that Obama has not used the word "depression" much, if at all since signing the stimulus bill? He can't, because his growth assumptions for his budget spending won't allow for it.
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