When Barack Obama released, his budget, he claimed that it didn’t contain “gimmicks” and that he cost of the budget was so high because he fully funded Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget and didn’t use gimmicks. Jackie Calmes of the New York Times swallowed the line so completely that she called her story “Obama bans gimmicks, deficits will rise”. (Never mind that the ever skeptical Slate Magazine had a different view) Her second paragraph of her story said:
The new accounting involves spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Medicare reimbursements to physicians and the cost of disaster responses.
Yet, just a little over a month later, … Barack Obama is asking for more money:
Washington, DC — President Obama today submitted to the Congress a Fiscal Year (FY) 2009 supplemental appropriations request totaling $83.4 billion to fund ongoing military, diplomatic, and intelligence operations.
An overwhelming amount of this money — nearly 95 percent — is to move forward with the President’s agenda of ending the war in Iraq responsibly and his new strategy of refocusing the fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
These are things that Obama campaigned on since 2007. But he didn’t plan for them in his budget. His budget assumed that the US would break its agreement with Iraq to pull out (decided before the election), according to Slate:
In this manner, the Obama administration pretends that some of the Bush tax cuts are going to affect the budget years after they are set to expire. It also assumes higher Medicare physician payments than projected under current law requirements. The same is true with the accounting for the Iraq war. The baseline assumes the war will be funded at high levels for the next 10 years, even though Obama is planning to bring 100,000 troops home in the next 19 months.
You would think that would save money. But no. Obama needs more. His budget not only had gimmicks. it just had lies.
