The latest Human Events column from former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich skewers the president’s budget proposals:
The 2012 budget proposed by the White House is a totally unserious and insulting continuation of the reckless big spending policies of Obama?s first two years in office.
The talk from the White House sounds fiscally responsible, but the actual numbers show this administration is still in denial about our debt crisis.
The President plans on adding nearly $5 trillion more to the debt held by the American public between now and 2016, bringing the total that we owe to creditors to over $15 trillion dollars.
(For a bit of context, in 1999, the last year I was Speaker, the publicly-held debt was only $3.6 trillion, and we were in the process of paying down nearly $500 billion of our debt by balancing four consecutive budgets. The projected deficit in 2011 is nearly as large as ALL federal spending in 1999.)
Nevertheless, in the press conference where he revealed his budget, the President tried to recast himself as a diligent custodian of the country?s fiscal house. He told reporters:
?What my budget does is to put forward some tough choices, some significant spending cuts, so that by the middle of this decade our annual spending will match our annual revenues. We will not be adding more to the national debt. So, to use a — sort of an analogy that families are familiar with, we’re not going to be running up the credit card anymore.?
This posture from the President is fundamentally dishonest.
