Deficit

In a statement released at 5 a.m. today, Senator Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, blasts the budget the Senate passed very early this morning. Sessions's main concern is that the budget "has zero real deficit reduction" and "never balances."

“The content of the plan the majority has now approved demonstrates why they were unwilling to reveal it for so long: their proposal, once accurately understood, cannot be publicly defended," says Sessions.

Senator Patty Murray, the Democratic chair of the Senate Budget Committee, finally released a budget today. Year over year, in this proposed budget, spending jumps dramatically. 

President Obama has often talked about the need to reduce the budget deficit. Before his run for the presidency, Senator Obama was rather harsh in his criticism of George Bush's deficits. And in July 2011, during the debt ceiling crisis, the president even addressed Congressional leaders in a talk the White House titled "President Obama on Deficit Reduction: “If Not Now, When?”  During the talk, he said:

Jay Carney, speaking today at the press briefing:

"The president has always believed that deficit reduction is not a goal unto itself," said Carney. "The whole purpose of deficit reduction should be part of an overall policy objective of strengthening the economy, having it grow faster, have it create more and better jobs for the middle class. And that's the president's objective."

Carney then indicated the president's budget will not be balanced.

This week Paul Ryan’s House Budget Committee is set to release its fiscal year 2014 budget, which promises to balance Uncle Sam’s books in 10 years. Ryan’s offering will elicit lamentations from the usual quarters of the mainstream media: House Republicans have lurched sharply to the right, they have abandoned the pragmatic principles of their forebears, they are now totally unfit to govern.

Since President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, more than $6 trillion dollars has been added to the national debt.

The White House has released limited excerpts of President Obama's State of the Union Address: 

“It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class.

In an interview this morning, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi made the case that we don't have a spending problem. Indeed, Pelosi says, it is wrong to say we have a "spending problem":

President Barack Obama used his second inaugural address Monday to offer an aggressive, unapologetic defense of activist government and to call for a new spirit of unity even as he seeks to move the country even further left.

At his press conference today, President Obama showed that he either thinks he can pull the wool over Americans’ eyes through the sheer force of his own outrageous rhetoric, or else he really believes his own rhetoric and is living in a fantasyland.  The guess here is that it’s a roughly even mix of the two.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said yesterday that "deficit reduction is not a worthy goal unto itself":

"Most importantly because deficit reduction is not a worthy goal unto itself," said Carney, talking about government spending. "This is all about making our economy stronger, making it more productive and allowing it to create even more jobs. That is the most important thing when it comes to economic policy as far as the President is concerned."

Having avoided the "fiscal cliff," we will now be in jeopardy of breaking our necks when we collide with the "debt ceiling." The responsible thing to do, we are already being told by the New York Times is ... to raise the ceiling: