The media are completely out of touch with reality and consistently misinform readers about the dire situation the U.S. is in when it comes to fiscal responsibility. The New York Times this week comments, under the title “In Age of Spending Cuts, Making a Case for Government”, on how President Obama in his State of the Union Address “made a case Tuesday night for closing out the politics of austerity.” Obama “asserted that ‘we can’t just cut our way to prosperity’ and suggested that it is time for a more balanced approach”.
One would think, reading this article or listening to Obama, if one didn’t know better, that the U.S. has been practicing “austerity” and making serious budget cuts to eliminate its enormous deficit and eventually to tackle its insane amount of debt.
Here are the actual numbers from the Congressional Budget Office’s Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023:
Notice, first of all, the fact that there are no spending cuts. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. None. Whatsoever. Spending will continue to increase every single year over the next decade. Notice, second, that while the deficit is projected to decline from this year until 2015, after that, it will begin to increase again, and will continue to increase every year after that, such that for eight of the next ten years, the deficit will be growing rather than shrinking.
Obama is in la-la land. Americans are in for a very rude awakening. Unfortunately, instead of helping them prepare, the media is doing a terrific job of blinding them to the realities of the situation with all this utterly nonsensical talk about being in an “Age of Spending Cuts”, ending “the politics of austerity”, and not being able to heal the economy through spending cuts alone — as if there were any.
