President Obama's Budget Numbers Are 'Not to Be Trusted

As many critics have noted, the president’s 2013 budget, replete with tax increases and so-called “spending cuts,” fails to close the deficit.

Some may recall that when Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) questioned Jeffrey Zients, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), during a House Budget Committee hearing, the OMB actually confessed: under the proposed plan, the budget would never be balanced.

“So much for a balanced approach,” writes Veronique de Rugy for National Review Online’s The Corner.

“This is bad news. As we know, most of the spending cuts will never materialize. Also, I suspect that the president’s plan will have a hard time delivering on the promise to increase tax collection above 19 percent of GDP as soon as 2015 and grow revenue to 20.1 percent of GDP by 2022,” de Rugy adds.

More importantly, she explains, data shows that budget numbers are “not to be trusted under any circumstances.”

Why?

Well, look at the president's 2009 budget. You may recall that the president claimed, by 2012, his budget would cut the deficit in half. The following chart illustrates how incredibly -- indeed, almost laughably -- wrong the president was:

A quick explanation: the blue bars represent what the president projected in his 2009 budget. The red bars represent what actually happened, as well as the projections for 2012 and 2013.

“In 2010 and 2011, the deficits were worse than projected. Not surprisingly, the further the projections, the less accurate they became. For instance, in 2009 the president promised that the deficit for 2012 would be less than $600 billion. In reality, it will be $1.3 trillion,” de Rugy writes.

“In the president’s defense, the same thing can be said about most budget predictions by previous administrations (even though the scale of the mistake is quite large). But this example goes a long way to show that the FY 2013 budget numbers are not to be trusted,” she adds.

(H/T: Verum Serum)