I’ve noted before that President Obama suffers from a bit of message schizophrenia when it comes to government spending. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. Sometimes we’ve had too much, sometimes we haven’t had enough.
This was on display again this morning as the president made opening remarks at his Fiscal Responsibility Summit. The topline message for the day: Spending is bad. Debts for children are bad. The deficit is monstrous. It’s time to get serious and end the gimmicks.
As the president noted: “This administration has inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit — the largest in our nation’s history and our investments to rescue our economy will add to that deficit in the short-term…. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few years, we cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences to the next budget, the next administration or the next generation.”
Fine enough. We get it. Congress spent too much “these past few years” and left you in a budgetary pickle.
But wait! President Obama also tells us: “We’re not going to be able to fall back into the same old habits, and make the same inexcusable mistakes, the repeated failure to act as our economy spiraled deeper into crisis.”
What now? Repeated failure to act? What about that $700 billion TARP financial-system rescue package? You know, the one that contributed more than half of the “inherited deficit” that proves Congress was “spending as it pleased” and “deferring the consequences to the next budget”? Seems like a pretty consequential action.
Sure, every politician wants to communicate the idea that his spending is good and the other party’s is bad. And it sure is easy to blame the deficit on the previous Administration’s profligacy without acknowledging the exigent circumstances that contributed to the deficits. But if President Obama wants to have credibility when he talks about spending matters, he ought to stop using his own rhetorical gimmicks that serve only to shade the truth and reignite the same arguments we’ve been hearing for decades.
