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.”
