Sessions Shreds Fiction From White House On Debt

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtA6OxPMRpM[/youtube]

The myth that President Obama has a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan: “The only plan that the president has put on paper and allowed anybody to see is his February budget, which doubles the national debt… If there is a secret plan that does exist somewhere, it should be made public. This afternoon. Let’s see it… As of now, there is only one debt limit plan on paper… That’s the plan we are debating today: cut, cap, and balance… Washington Democrats are resisting cut, cap, and balance because they know there’s no gimmick or accounting trick to get around it… The American people do not support a Washington plan to pass some grand deal with tax hikes that never go away and spending cuts that never materialize.”
 
The myth that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the Bush tax cuts are the cause of our fiscal crisis: “Over the entire decade, the cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is about $1.3 trillion… This year alone, the deficit is expected to be $1.4 trillion… The total amount of money spent since the president took office is $8.5 trillion dollars… In the last two years, non-defense discretionary spending has soared 24 percent. The stimulus package alone—enacted into law in a single day in 2009—cost more than the entire war in Iraq.”
 
The myth that the Gang of Six outline is a concrete plan with $4 trillion in deficit reduction: “My staff on the Budget Committee, taking the summary pages that they’ve produced for us, can only find $1.2 trillion in reduced spending in that outline, along with what is clearly a $1 trillion tax increase. Where does the other $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction claimed in the outline come from?”
 
The myth that the modest spending cuts being discussed will be sufficient to change our debt trajectory: “Our Democrat colleagues have said—although no plan has ever been made public to this effect—that they could get behind a budget deal that reduces the deficit $4 trillion over the next ten years, half of it comprised of spending cuts. This is not even close, frankly, to what is needed to ultimately balance our budget. We are projected to spend $46 trillion over the next ten years… In just a little over 2 months our debt will equal 100 percent of our GDP—matching the size of our entire economy. It already costs us a million jobs or more a year.”