Morning Bell: A Sobering Wake Up Call

Conn Carroll / August 26, 2009

Defending mounting job losses despite his administration’s $787 billion stimulus package, Vice President Joe Biden told ABC News George Stephanopoulos last month: “The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy. The figures we worked off of in January were the consensus figures and most of the blue chip indexes out there.” This is just not true. Yesterday the White House released their Mid-Session Review admitting that President Barack Obama’s policies would force our nation to borrow more than $9 trillion over the next ten years.

Commenting on the gap between the new $9 trillion number and the $7 trillion number the Office of Management and Budget used to sell President Obama’s budget to Congress, the Washington Post reports:

The extra $1.9 trillion in red ink mainly reflects the Office of Management and Budget’s adoption of more realistic — that is, more pessimistic — estimates of economic growth and unemployment. White House officials protest that their original, rosier numbers made sense at the time; actually, plenty of forecasters, including those at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, made more accurate calls. This situation was foreseeable and should have been acknowledged earlier.

While it is good that the Obama administration is finally admitting that the fundamental assumptions driving their economic policy were wrong, the reality of our current budget deficit, and what President Obama’s policies threaten to do to our national debt over the next decade, are truly sobering. Heritage senior policy analyst Brian Riedl details the carnage: (more…)