[VIDEO] Just One Dollar Less: Why Washington’s Budget Will Be $150 Billion More in 2014

What would happen if lawmakers took this year’s budget, subtracted $1, and made that the budget for next year? Let Freedom Ring made this video asking policymakers to do just that:

If lawmakers did this, they would need to cut the 2014 budget by nearly $150 billion. That’s right: Federal spending is already projected to rise by nearly $150 billion in fiscal year 2014. So even keeping the budget the same would, essentially, “cut” the budget by nearly twice the amount that sequestration cut in 2013.

According to Let Freedom Ring’s own polling, 80 percent of the public would support such a commitment.

But instead, spending just keeps going up. Only 4 percent of Americans polled favor increased spending, making Congress, with its whopping 9 percent approval rating, twice as popular as a larger budget.

The ongoing budget conference is an important opportunity for lawmakers to agree to reduce spending in the near term, and most importantly, the long term. Discretionary spending is approved annually by Congress and makes up around one-third of all federal spending. Mandatory programs constitute roughly two-thirds of federal spending and are for the most part not included in annual appropriations; they automatically rise to accommodate new beneficiaries and changes in program costs—rising with changes in the cost of living and the cost of health care, for example. So this is where the budget conference should focus.

Via: Foundry

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The Cost of Spending: Can deficit-reduction plans make a dent?

The report from President Obama's highly touted deficit-reduction commission came out two years and 18 days ago. 

On that brisk December morning, Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad painted a dire picture if lawmakers didn't move quickly.

"If we fail to act now, our country could find itself in a circumstance in which we have to take draconian action, at the worst possible time in the middle of a crisis. I pray to God that we have the wisdom to act before that point," he said. 

The two commission co-chairmen couldn't agree more. "This baby ain't going away," co-chairman Alan Simpson said.

But so far, Congress has not been able to pass a plan that achieves what their proposal would -- a $4 trillion deficit reduction within 10 years. And it's unclear if they ever will. 

In the current talks over the looming fiscal crisis, the deal on the table is considerably smaller -- and yet President Obama said Wednesday that Republicans should be pleased with the spending cuts they'd be getting him to sign onto.

"Take the deal," he said. "You know, they will be able to claim that they have worked with me over the last two years to reduce the deficit more than any other deficit reduction package; that we will have stabilized it for 10 years. That is a significant achievement for them. They should be proud of it." 

But clearly, they're not.

Last week, Republicans warned about "kicking the can down the road" and "doing all the gimmicks that have been done in the past." 

Via: Fox News

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Phantom Savings Obama’s debt-reduction plan is filled with gimmicks

President Barack Obama is repeating a debunked claim regarding his commitment to deficit reduction, one of the highest priority issues for voters this election cycle.

In a campaign video unveiled Wednesday, the president called for a “new economic patriotism” and touted his “balanced plan to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade.”

The claim that Obama has a plan—in the form of his most recent budget proposal—to reduce the federal deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years has been a constant refrain from the president on the campaign trail, and has been echoed by his Democratic allies.

Former President Bill Clinton, for example, praised Obama’s “reasonable plan of $4 trillion in debt reduction over a decade” during his primetime speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C.

However, as Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s in-house fact-checker,has made clear: “The repeated claim that Obama’s budget reduces the deficit by $4 trillion is simply not accurate.”

“Virtually no serious budget analyst agreed” with the Obama administration’s accounting with respect to the $4 trillion figure, Kessler found.

Independent experts panned the president’s budget for its “troubling” reliance on gimmicks and accounting tricks to inflate the magnitude of the savings being proposed.

Keith Hennessey, a former director of the National Economic Council, estimated the true value of Obama’s deficit reduction—minus these gimmicks—to be about $2.8 trillion, and called even that reduced figure a “generous” assessment.

The president’s budget, for instance, takes credit for about $1 trillion in spending cuts that were already signed into law in 2011, and should already be incorporated given that they fall outside the 10-year budget window.

The budget also includes another $800 billion in phantom savings related to the military drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan—money that would never have been spent to begin with—and another $800 billion in projected savings due to reduced interest payments on the debt, something not traditionally cited in federal budget documents as a form of government “spending” that can be “cut.”

Via: WFB

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