Obama On Letterman: 'Not Sure How Much The Debt Is'
Obama's headline appearance on the Late Show with Dave Letterman, Sep. 18.
Too scared to say '$16 trillion' on national television, the Deficit President plays dumb on the debt.
All politicians should be required to wear clocks around their necks displaying a running tally of the national debt. Something like this:
Letterman: "Here’s what I found troubling at the GOP convention. They had the clock, the debt countdown clock and, I mean, this thing is moving like crazy and it’s several trillion dollars. Now, what is that?"
Obama responded with a recent history of government spending.
Then Letterman went back to the tally: "Now, do you remember what that number was? Was it $10 trillion?"
Then came the payoff, as the president made clear that he really didn’t want to say the word '16': "I don’t remember what the number was precisely."
Obama says the debt is not a problem in the short term but is a medium and long term concern. We wonder how he is defining short, medium and long term. To Obama, short term means the next 4 years if he wins re-election, and medium and long term are when it becomes someone else's problem.
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In 2008 candidate Obama said Bush was "unpatriotic" for adding over $4 trillion to the national debt in eight years.
But the numbers show that Obama will add $6 trillion to the debt in just 4 years. Perhaps this explains his national debt amnesia on Letterman.
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One last clip:
Obama also told Letterman that it isn’t right to refer to political opponents as 'unpatriotic.' Naturally he didn’t say that he’s the one exception to that rule.
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Obama is not being honest with the numbers. A brilliant rebuttal from STR.
Excerpt
For the record, the national debt was $10.626 trillion the day Obama took office. Bush increased it by $4 trillion during his entire 8-year presidency and Obama demonized him. But by the time Obama looks at his calendar on January 20, 2013, he will have racked up more than $6 trillion in just four years.
Obama says, “When I walked into office we had a trillion dollar deficit.” That’s actually a blatant lie. When Obama walked into office Bush handed him a (still way too high unless you compare it to Obama) $400 billion budget deficit. That $400 billion was the deficit that Bush left Obama for fiscal year 2009 if Obama hadn’t then loaded and larded it up with debt piled on top of debt.
Obama is blaming Bush for: 1) Obama’s $862 billion stimulus; 2) Obama’s $79 billion bailout for Government Motors and their union Democrats; 3) Obama’s $410 billion Omnibus bill; 4) Obama’s $350 billion in TARP money that Obama voted for and that Bush left for him. That’s how you turn Bush’s $400 billion into Obama’s whining about a trillion.
In a way what Obama is trying to do with his deficit is what he’s trying to do in pretty much everything. Obama spends $79 billion to bail out GM. Obama takes credit for it as an evidence of his glorious Obamaness. But who does Obama stick with the bill? Bush. That deal happened in March of 2009 and therefore is “Bush’s fault.” Bush gets zero credit but gets stuck with the entire bill for Obama’s extravagance.
Our real debt isn’t the $16 trillion ($6 trillion of which accumulated under Obama’s watch); it’s $222 trillion PLUS because of all the unfunded costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
"The national debt is so f-ing funny, Dave..."
Feb 5, 2013 at 11:19 AM
Reader Comments (10)
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/09/19/obama-dont-worry-about-16-trillion-debt/
Let’s help the President out with data from the U.S. Department of the Treasury:
When President Obama took office, the total national debt was nearly $10.6 trillion. Today, it’s over $16 trillion. That’s more than a 50 percent increase in the national debt in less than four years.
Debt held by the public was $6.3 trillion on Inauguration Day. Today, that number is about $11.3 trillion. That is an 80 percent increase and sets a new record.
Then America can focus on legitimate creditors with the help of competent bankers who replace the degenerate psychopathic gamblers running the TBTF.
We're never gonna pay back $16 tril anyway, and indictments are way overdue, so why the hell not? Let's quit screwing around and get it on.
There are 3 ways to form capital: farming, mining, and manufacturing. That's it. In each case, $5 of labor is combined with $5 of resources for an output of $20, that is, $10 of new capital. You will notice that banking isn't on the list of capital-forming activities.
Wall Street follows a superficially similar model, combining a $5 note is combined with another $5 note and selling the package to investors for $100, that is, over $90 of fraud has been created. For this service, bankers lavish themselves with compensation equal to 40% of revenues. Academics and assorted eggheads refer to this model as "financialization." In hushed tones at private parties, they'll refer to it as gambling, blissfully unaware that there's not an horse race bet available in a single U.S. OTB where the takeout (1) amounts to 40% or (2) requires multiple crimes to occur.
Wall Street, in other words, is little more than a cancerous parasite that is killing its host--Main Street U.S.A.--at a 40% per annum clip. Does anyone seriously believe that there's not a direct, live wire connection between the bailouts and the debt? Again, let's just euthanize these huge banks and get it over with.
We can do it using orderly procedures available through the FDIC and the bankruptcy courts, etc., or we can let it happen with blunter implements like chains, blow torches, and long ropes. But the cancer will die somehow, one way or another. They all do.
Simon Johnson calculated that the crisis added $3 trillion to the national debt by causing the recession that has now semi-permanently kept tax revenues down. I've posted the link before from an op-ed he wrote in the nyt, but I can't find it now.