1 Year Later-Obama's Legacy of Lies and Broken Promises
by Hans BaderIt’s been a year since the president was elected, and he’s already piled up an impressive list of lies and broken promises.
The broken promises include his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, and his promise not to sign bills without first giving the public five days of notice.
The Congressional Budget Office says that Obama’s proposed budgets will explode the national debt through massive spending increases, increasing the already large deficits left behind by the Bush administration from $4.4 trillion to $9.3 trillion. His record-setting budgets flagrantly violate his promise to propose a “net spending cut.”
Obama broke his campaign promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year by signing into law a regressive excise tax increase to expand the SCHIP program, and by proposing a cap-and-trade energy tax that could charge up to $2 trillion, a massive cost that Obama himself has said will be passed “on to consumers,” as well as homeowners and motorists. (In 2008, Obama privately admitted to the San Francisco Chronicle that if he was elected, electricity bills would “skyrocket” under his administration, but it didn’t report that).
He also broke his promise not to raise taxes by backing health-care bills that would impose a laundry list of new taxes on the middle class, including a tax on uninsured people. Americans for Tax Reform earlier summarized the tax increases in ObamaCare: an individual mandate tax of $900 per individual or $3800 per family (if you don’t have health insurance); an employer mandate tax of $400 per employee if health coverage is not offered; an “excise tax on high-cost health plans”; a “medicine cabinet tax”; capping Flexible-Spending Accounts (FSA’s); abolishing most HSAs; and increasing tax penalties for HSAs.
The costly cap-and-trade energy bill supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases, administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise. “Officials at the Treasury Department think cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to the Washington Times” by CEI. It could raise household taxes by $1761 per year, equivalent to a 15 percent tax increase. It would also result in “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs.” (Obama earlier admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”).
Although cap-and-trade backers claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them and also result in dirtier air, as well as harming forests and water supplies. It would enrich politically-connected corporations, and result in massive destruction of the world’s forests. By expanding ethanol subsidies and mandates, it would cause enormous “damage to water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol subsidies have already resulted in forests being destroyed in the Third World, and by diverting cropland to fuel production away from food production, they have already caused famines that have killed countless people in the world’s poorest countries.
Over and over again, Obama has broken his campaign promise to give the public five days of notice before signing bills into law, including his very first law, the trial-lawyer backed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Obama also repeatedly made false claims about the Supreme Court decision that the Ledbetter law overruled, misstating the facts of that case and how long it gives employees to sue over pay discrimination (the Court did NOT say that employees have to sue even before discovering discrimination).
Obama broke seven campaign promises dealing with transparency and clean government in signing the $800 billion stimulus package, much of whose contents were secret until shortly before Congress voted on it, and whose 1400 pages went unread by most Congressmen who voted on it. (It repealed welfare reform and contained loads of welfare, pork, and waste, while wiping out jobs in the export sector).
Obama’s broken promises are part of a larger pattern of dishonesty. Obama claimed his $800 billion stimulus package was needed to avert “irreversible decline.” But the Congressional Budget Office concluded before and after its passage that the stimulus package will actually cut the size of the economy in the long run. Obama’s budgets don’t add up, either, piling up $9.3 trillion in red ink, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a staggering $2.3 trillion more than Obama claimed.











1 Year Later-Obama's Legacy of Lies and Broken Promises
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Nice smile, though.
And at least we have not been attacked by anyone...
Seriously, this guy relieved the watch 9 months ago.
Taxes? Whatever. If you want to count everything a company can "trickle down" on us, then our whole freaking economy is tax. He's promise was clearly talking about taxing individuals directly.
You can't whine about taxes and the deficit at the same time - that's how the GOP has got us in this mess.
Me thinks we doth protest too much.
Especially since his main promise was to stop the downfall of the US Economy, which seems to have been fulfilled. It still sucks, but that's how the corporate capital economy works. Rich get richer, poor get poorer, money loses value, dumb people complain about the wrong stuff.
et cetera, et cetera
- Submariner November 4, 2009 3:02PM
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Obama Made Economy Worse
"Especially since his main promise was to stop the downfall of the US Economy, which seems to have been fulfilled. It still sucks, but that's how the corporate capital economy works. Rich get richer, poor get poorer, money loses value, dumb people complain about the wrong stuff."
Exactly how has he fullfilled his promise to "stop the downfall of the economy"? He claimed that congress had to rush through his stimulus plan in order to prevent unemployment from rising further. They passed it and the economy got even worse. Despite all of Obamas "efforts", he has failed to keep his primary promise.
Obamas economic policies are designed to cause the devaluation of the U.S. dollar. It isn't some phenomenon of the "corporate capital economy" as you put it.
- Jordan
November 4, 2009 4:09PM
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Bad Economy?
The economy is crappy - it's supposed to get worse. That's the whole schtick for a century now.
Our economy is based on subsidizig business with an indirect tax on the whole system.
The inflation is a direct reflection of our monetary system's need to constantly pump currency into the system.
The interest on that debt is the overhead and profit margin of corporate banking and finance since the Fed was established (by bank cronies, AKA Republicans then, but its a free for all these days).
Our economy has been driven more and more by base consumption since World War II, and since then the GOP has drastically overspent, compared to the democrats, because the Dem's have been more willing to tax us, especially the wealthiest of us, with a direct tax.
The service industry is the center of our economy today because of the shortsighted greed inherent in capitalism is addicted to the heady profiteering made possible in the disposable/consumable economic environment we live in today. We just need people to make enough to get by and by a bunch of garbage to eat, crap, and throw away.
The polarized, least-common-denominator political climate is also screwing us over by running interferrence while most the rest of corporate america rapes us for what we are worth in the energy , food , insurance, real estate, and medical industries.
All true and even agreed upon more or less across the country. The real controversy should be the solutions, but instead people are yacking about gun control , gay marriage , and ' race baiting'...
But none of this is Obama's fault. It's systematic, indemic to our way of life, because around 1950 most American's just stopped prioritizing the future, their fellow people, and the world we live in over making it through the work day often enough to watch TV till it was time to go back to work.
I guess we just elected this president to have someone to blame all of our failings on.
Even if Obama fails to do the things people voted for him to do, like socialize health care , redistribute wealth more fairly, and bring an iota of dignity to the White House, none of this crap will be his fault.
It will be the fault of a government subsidized cartel of corporate conglomerates that are pretty much screwing everything over as fast as possible.
So, if you are going to bitch about Obama, complain about his lack of aggression on those fronts, and you better be willing to Tyler Durden this whole gig, because if this guy is not really "the one" then there ain't one.
- Submariner November 4, 2009 6:52PM
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"But none of this is Obama's fault."
You can't honestly believe this in the face of the facts.
Obama supported the huge corporate give aways of tax money through bailouts , the stimulus plan and TARP. He voted for/signed into law each of those disasterous pieces of legislation that enrich corporate and union special intersts at the expense of the American taxpayers. He also supports the health care bill which will do more of the same in addition to allowing government intrusion into every aspect of our daily lives.
Obama was elected to end the reverse the failures of the Bush era but instead he is, to borrow his own words, "doubling down on the mistakes of the past."
"I guess we just elected this president to have someone to blame all of our failings on. "
You seem to think that a relatively recently elected President should not be criticized for his decisions. How long does he have to be in office before he accepts responsibility for his policies? 2 years? A full term? I somehow doubt that you waited very long before you leveled your first charge against Bush.
- Jordan
November 5, 2009 12:31PM
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"But none of this is Obama's fault."
Yes, I do.
Bailouts are old hat. Hell, at least the corporations Obama gave money too (Bush was the one that evaporeted the first billion to Insurance, Banking and Investment frauds) actually employ people for real work.
If he does not do something about the monetary system once the employment comes around, I will be disappointed.
And I expect to be really, people seem convinced that just some regulation will fix things suddenly.
Still, I think most people that voted for him did so for socialized healthcare , eqalitarian economic policies with regards to labor , wages, and welfare, and to restore our credibility on the world stage, preferably in a peaceful manner.
He's not doing a superhero job, but I'm not hearing any qualified suggestions for how to solve everyones problems for them, which most of America seems to expect from him, then and now.
For the record, I voted for Bush in 2000. Although I was very upset about what his campaign did to McCain, and unsettled by that election fiasco, I gave him the benefit of the doubt because I thought the GOP might be able to make something out of the first US Government Surplus in modern history. Big dissappointment there, 9/11 notwithstanding.
I think needlessly invading Iraq and all the weird legislation that went down while everyone was mourning 9/11 is what really set me against him by 2004. Well, that and he kept trying so hard to convince me he was a complete tool for Cheney and the rest of the cronies that ran things the last 8 years.
- Submariner November 5, 2009 3:10PM
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Obama Broken Promises
Thanks for drawing attention to these issues. We've also been working hard to do so at our website. We have a list of 780 Obama broken promises, lies, flip flops and scandals! He is hard to keep up with! You can see the list at http://conservativeamerican.org
- Peter Andrew
November 4, 2009 5:50PM
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