NEOAVATARA

Facts are off just by that much...

There are so many misstatements from the Obama presser of his ’100th day gala celebrations’ that it is hard to comment on all of them.  Here is just a few:

OBAMA: “We began by passing a Recovery Act that has already saved or created over 150,000 jobs.” — from news conference.

NEOAVATARA:  Um, right.  The U.S. has lost 1.2 million jobs since the inauguration.  And no one knows whose 150,000 jobs he is talking about…he is pulling this number out of thin air.

OBAMA: “Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit. … That wasn’t me. Number two, there is almost uniform consensus among economists that in the middle of the biggest crisis, financial crisis, since the Great Depression, we had to take extraordinary steps. So you’ve got a lot of Republican economists who agree that we had to do a stimulus package and we had to do something about the banks. Those are one-time charges, and they’re big, and they’ll make our deficits go up over the next two years.”

NEOAVATARA:  First, what were you doing in the Senate the last two years?  Oh yeah, voting for those big expenditures.  I don’t remember you filibustering them.  Second, the purse in controlled by Congress…I thought you were a Constitutional expert?  Also, if you subtract the Bush spending, Mr. Obama’s debt will double the U.S. debt in 5 years; that means all the debt that the U.S.A. accumulated since 1776…Obama will spend by 2014.

OBAMA: “I think one basic principle that we know is that the more we do on the (disease) prevention side, the more we can obtain serious savings down the road. … If we’re making those investments, we will save huge amounts of money in the long term.”

NEOAVATARA:  I personally have discounted this.  The New England Journal of Medicine, and many others, have disputed whether there is any real cost savings to spending on prevention.  And a study released in December by the Congressional Budget Office found that increasing preventive care “could improve people’s health but would probably generate either modest reductions in the overall costs of health care or increases in such spending within a 10-year budgetary time frame.”  As a physician myself, I agree, we should do better in preventing illness…but prevention is expensive as well.

OBAMA:  “You could cut (Social Security) benefits. You could raise the tax on everybody so everybody’s payroll tax goes up a little bit. Or you can do what I think is probably the best solution, which is you can raise the cap on the payroll tax.”

NEOAVATARA:  Removing the cap would be one of the largest tax increases in history.  I am sure that wouldn’t have any deleterious effects on the economy.  But that isn’t even the worst part:  Obama’s proposal would reduce the Social Security trust fund’s deficit by less than half, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

OBAMA:  “We have given a tax cut to 95% of all Americans…”

NEOAVATARA:  This is one of the most oft repeated claims, and is highly suspect…until you realize that Obama doesn’t just mean taxes.  He also includes any savings the government provides the citizens of this country as a ‘tax’ cut.  For example, you refinance your mortgage, hey, that is a tax cut!  Of course, that is nonsense…because there is a real definition of ‘taxes’, regardless of how the President portrays it.  Words mean things.  And, since the mortgage interest in a refi is actually decreasing, you could argue you are actually paying more in overall taxes with refinance, because your deduction is smaller.  But lets not get facts get in the way of a good argument.

And that is just the facts that I had time for…