Monday, February 09, 2015

Gridlock is Good! (exclamation point optional)

Gridlock Escher
In January, the Congressional Budget Office published the 2015 estimate of federal spending, revenues, and deficit. On Groundhog Day, President Barack Obama released the administration's proposed FY 2016 Federal Budget. At the intersection of the two was a White House twitter-storm promoting the budget and taking credit for deficit reduction during the Obama administration.
The White House neglected to mention that the deficit reduction was primarily realized over the four years since the GOP took majority control of the House of Representative and divided the government. It takes a special kind of chutzpah for the President to complain about "mindless austerity" and congressional obstruction when they are the very reason for the declining deficit he is bragging about. But he did. The cognitive dissonance is only made worse by a few inconvenient facts: