Obama Sets Personal Record for Misleading in One Conference

We all know about Obama's tendency to lie, exxagerate, say one thing while doing the other, last nights press conference was a buffet of nonsense that might be his personal best.


For starters:

His assertion that his proposed budget ''will cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term'' is an eyeball-roller for many economists, given the uncharted terrain of trillion-dollar deficits the government is negotiating.

--He promised vast savings from increased spending on preventive health care in the face of doubts that such an effort, however laudable it might be for public welfare, can pay for itself, let aloneyield huge savings.

--He pitched a remedy for Social Security's long-term crisis that analysts say won't fix half the problem.

There will be no entitlement reform, Pelosi and Reid don't want it and the President lacks the political will to fight his own base. His budget is a lie and swimming in the red. As for health care savings, this is a talking point on the left as they try and explain how certain actions will stop future illness, hence saving money. This in turn will balance out the hundreds of billions in extra spending the President plans. Add that to alleged savings from electronic records and the books will balance. In reality these unproven savings will be minimal but the costs will skyrocket.

The Biggest Lie of the Evening:

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

THE FACTS: This assertion is dubious on several levels. For starters, the U.S. has lost more than 1.2 million jobs since Obama took office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even if Obama's stimulus bill saved or created as many jobs as he says, that number is dwarfed by the number of recent job losses.

But Obama's number is murky, at best. The White House has not yet announced how it intends to count jobs created by the stimulus bill. Obama's number is based on a job-counting formula that his economists have developed but have not made public. Until that formula is announced -- probably in the coming week or so -- there's no way to assess its accuracy.

Whatever the formula, economists who study job creation say it will require some creative math. That's because Obama has lumped ''jobs saved'' in with ''jobs created.

Saved jobs are as real as the health care savings he points to, they exist in his talking points but not in reality. Of course Obama, showing his "New Era of Responsibility" blames Bush, AP calls him on it:

OBAMA: ''Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit. ... That wasn't me.'' -- in Missouri.

THE FACTS:

Congress, under Democratic control in 2007 and 2008, held the purse strings that led to the deficit Obama inherited. A Republican president, George W. Bush, had a role too: He signed the legislation.

Obama supported the emergency financial bailout package in Bush's final months -- a package Democratic leaders wanted to make bigger.

To be sure, Obama opposed the Iraq war, a drain on federal coffers for six years before he became president. But with one major exception, he voted in support of Iraq war spending.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has estimated Obama's policy proposals would add a net $428 billion to the deficit over four years, even accounting for his spending reduction goals. Now, the deficit is nearly quadrupling to $1.75 trillion.

Other whoppers, during the campaign Obama cautioned against ''sweeping statements about the cost-saving potential of prevention, however, are overreaching.'' , last night he said this

"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.''

Of course in the real world here are the facts:

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.''

Lies and misdirection as the President blows smoke.