Obama: Hey, I Know How To Make My Budget Look Like It's Reducing Spending. I'll Just Ignore The Massive and Growing Ever More Massive Interest Payments I Have To Make.

Full on abdication of leadership and responsibility and all-in on government by lie.

Since Obama's planning to not pay debt interest, anyway, I guess there's no problem if we refuse to raise the debt limit, huh?

To justify the administration claim [of narrowing deficits], Lew said the administration was merely referring to "primary balance" -- or federal spending minus interest payments. Lew sought to forgive the public for their confusion.

"The terminology that we use in Washington of primary balance is a little confusing," Lew said.

"It's because I believe it's dishonest," Ensign shot back.

Republicans were understandably befuddled....

If the government does what the Obama administration is recommending, net interest payments will go from about $200 billion this year to $844 billion in a decade. That's more than the country spends now on Social Security.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, at his first official press briefing on the job, used the credit card analogy Wednesday and acknowledged interest rates "have to be contended with."

"But the first important step in dealing with this issue is getting your regular spending and income in balance so that you're no longer adding to the problem," he said. "And interest payments are a major portion of our long term debt problem that we need to address. But it is not an inconsequential deal."

Yet President Obama and Lew neglected to explain this point in their initial statements. Lew, in an interview Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union," said: "Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we're not adding to the debt anymore. We're spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt."

I looked up "primary budget" and it is a real term; so it has some kind of usefulness in discussing budgets, I guess. But it's sure not what we talk about when we talk about budget and balancing budgets.

Bonus points for the Obama Administration "forgetting" to mention they were only talking about "primary budget" when they seemed to be talking about the budget.

Obama As Fletch: Apparently, as a commenter suggests, Obama just plans on floating the crushing debt on the Underhills' tab.

The problem with that is that Underhill noticed a couple of lobster Thermadores and a couple of bottles of champagne. I think he's going to get suspicious when Bam-Bam lays a $8 trillion charge on his account.

posted by Ace at 04:15 PM

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