New Budget, Same Entitlement Deception from Obama

WashingtonExaminer.com

Figures don't lie, the old expression goes, but liars most certainly do figure. Unfortunately, when it comes to federal budget numbers, this adage fails to capture how deep numerical and statistical deceptions can go in Washington.

Both budget figures and the public figures who hold high-profile government jobs are capable of misleading the public. This week, with Monday's release of President Obama's new fiscal 2016 budget, they are both doing so simultaneously.

One deception involves the Social Security program, whose shaky finances Democrats once relied upon to scare senior citizens into voting for them. The trust fund for Social Security's retirement program, as is well known, has only about twenty years of solvency left. But the trust fund for Social Security's disability program, whose rolls suddenly swelled amid the recent recession, will be out of money before Obama even leaves office.

Obama has repeatedly promised to address the tough issues that business-as-usual politicians have put off for so long. This was once believed to set him apart. Yet his budget lays out a plan to kick this can down the road for some future president to handle. Even a New York Times news story on the budget — hardly a Republican mouthpiece — noted, "the new budget plan does virtually nothing to change the trajectory of entitlement spending by the federal government."

Obama's budget asks Congress to “reallocate existing payroll tax collections” so as to take money intended for Social Security's already-shaky retirement program and hand it over instead to the disability program. In short, he wants to loot the retirement fund for today's 45-and-under workers in order to pay another program's current bills, rather than take up the hard work of fixing a disability program rife with fraudulent claims.

Another deception in Obama's budget goes all the way back to 2010, when Obama sold his national healthcare law as something that wouldn't add a dime to the deficit. This was possible because a quirk in the accounting system created the appearance that Obamacare could apply the same savings from Medicare cuts to both the regular federal budget and to the solvency of the Medicare program itself. This is not like a Ponzi scheme — it is more like a scam in which multiple bad checks are written against the same account at once.

The way the accounting works, a cut to projected spending levels of Medicare is recorded as extending the life of the program's trust fund. But with Obamacare, that money was used to help finance the creation of an expensive new healthcare entitlement. Even though both the Congressional Budget Office and actuaries at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have clarified that — regardless of how it looks on paper — the same money can't be simultaneously used for both purposes, it hasn't stopped the Obama administration from claiming otherwise. This was not the only such manipulation, either, as advisor Jonathan Gruber would later share in an academic forum.

In his new budget, Obama does the same thing. He proposes modest cuts to future spending on Medicare — claiming the money will extend the life of Medicare by five years — but then uses the money to help finance other new spending priorities.

Obama has deceived the public on entitlement reform for so long that it hardly makes sense to stop now, in his seventh year as president. But Congress will do well not to go along with his deception on Social Security, and Republicans should continue to push for genuine reform to Medicare. The American people are by now aware of the hard truths about these programs and their unsustainable trajectories. Voters are much more savvy today than they were in the early 1990s. They are open to reforming these programs, and they will listen to, respect, and reward leaders who are willing to part from Obama's course and tell the truth about them.