NRD Editor’s Note: This column originally appeared at TheHill.com.
By Rick Manning — Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, explains in better terms than I can muster why Obama’s campaign claim that his budget plan would pay down the debt is 10 Pinocchios false.
Here’s what Sessions said recently in the weekly Republican address:
“[The president] continues to insist that his budget plan will pay down the debt … Let’s review the facts. To pay down the debt requires a surplus. Under the president’s 10-year budget, there is never a surplus. The single lowest annual deficit is $543 billion. The annual deficit in the 10th year grows to $652 billion. Despite $1.8 trillion in new taxes, his budget increases our spending and debt every year, adding $11 trillion to the debt overall. Just the interest alone on our debt would exceed defense spending in seven years. These are not my numbers; they come from the tables in the president’s own budget document that he printed and sent to Congress. For the president to say his plan will pay down the debt is one of the greatest financial misrepresentations ever made to the American people.”
The question that remains is, how do television stations, which have required rigorous fact-checking for every ad that I have ever been involved in, allow millions of dollars of ads to be run over the public airwaves that continue to restate “the greatest financial misrepresentation ever made to the American people”?
Perhaps it is time for the American people to take action by contacting any television station or network that carries an Obama ad that states the he has a plan to pay down the debt, and ask them directly why they are running a demonstrably false ad.
Provide the stations with Sessions’s words, which are irrefutable, and ask them to pull down the Obama ad as blatantly untruthful.
The big lie only works if people who know the truth stand silently by.
The American people cannot rely upon anyone else to do it. This is each of our chance to stand up for the actual truth and put an end to this fantasy that Obama is preaching to America that he can spend all the money he wants, and somehow still pay down the debt.
It’s time to take down the big Obama “pay down the debt” lie.
Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is the communications director of Americans for Limited Government.
