The liberal news media have long blamed tax cuts for deficit, rather than blaming government spending. CNN Money.com's senior writer, Jeanne Sahadi, repeated this worn out meme again on June 8 [1].
Sahadi's piece cited 'two factors' that caused the national debt to "exceed the size of the economy this year:" lower GDP estimate than last year and of course … the tax cuts.
"The debt grew larger because of a tax cut deal brokered by President Obama and Republicans last December. That deal will add an estimated $858 billion to the deficits over a decade - $410 billion of it in 2011 alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office," Sahadi wrote.
She went on to argue that spending cuts alone would be unable to reduce the federal deficit, and instead blamed tax cuts for the growing deficit, despite numbers to the contrary.
The piece ignored the Obama administration's spendy ways, except to say that "Republicans criticize Obama for spending too much." Sahadi ignored the fact that Obama's proposed 2011 budget was the largest federal budget in history. Obama originally submitted a $3.8 trillion federal budget [2] for fiscal year 2011 - the projected deficit of would have been 1.6 trillion dollars.
This number only increased with time. Although Obama's proposed budget was slashed by $38.5 billion dollars after massive fighting with Congress, the deficit for the 2011 budget [3] was estimated at $1.645 trillion dollars, with revenues of $2.174 trillion and expenses of $3.819 trillion, according to the White House website. So more than forty percent of Obama's budget for 2011 was funded by deficit spending.
Sahadi has consistently argued for tax increases during the past year on CNN Money, writing pieces on March 19 [4], May 9 [5], and May 12 [6] with the same theme: that tax increases are needed to solve the deficit problem. Sahadi also claimed on Feb. 14 [7], 2011 that the $3.7 billion budget, the largest budget ever submitted to Congress, would result in "painful cuts" in spending.
