Demanding a federal budget that is fair, responsible, and meets our nation's priorities

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Presidential Prevarication

Below, we had a quick look at the President's speech last week to the American Legislative Exchange Council in Philadelphia. We noted its rhetorical tone, which did not seem well-suited to successful summitry.

This week, Stan Collender of National Journal finds six substantively suspect statements in the speech. Among the incidents of "incorrect information, substantial misinformation, and disingenuous statement" was when the president

bragged about how the FY07 deficit would be "lower than the national average over the last 10 years." But that calculation seems to exclude the surpluses that existed from FY98 to FY01. When those four years are included, the average deficit is 0.9 percent of GDP, and the FY08 number the president cited is well above it.

The only way the president's statement is correct is if he looks just at the past six years. So what he was really saying wasn't that this year's deficit would be less than the average from the past decade, just that it will be lower as a percentage of GDP than the average of the six deficits that have occurred while he has been in office. That just doesn't sound as good, and isn't.

Thanks, Stan, for pointing this out. I'm not sure this will "keep" the administration honest, but at least he and we at OMB Watch are, well, watching.