WaPo and Obama Administration shape numbers and claim fiscal restraint

United States Surpluses & Deficits Graph (in billions of dollars) Image Credit: The Washington Post / Hugh Hewitt (blog)

WaPo and Obama Administration shape numbers and claim fiscal restraint

The average person stumbling upon an article appearing in The Washington Post, yesterday, about the economy and Government spending would think that our current leadership was having success at being responsible with the citizens money that had been collected in taxes.

The article begins with the following quote excerpted from The Washington Post:

Obama team points to smaller deficit numbers
By David Cho - Washington Post Staff Writer - Tuesday, April 13, 2010

"The federal deficit is running significantly lower than it did last year, with the budget gap for the first half of fiscal 2010 down 8 percent over the same period a year ago, senior Obama administration officials said Monday."
Reference Here>>

While, technically, this statement may be true, it masks the fact that the larger truth is that this adjusted figure moved from being ten (10) times larger than the deficit created by the previous leadership in 2007, to just nine (9) times larger. The Washington Post does reveal the information of this fact in two areas in their article on the Obama Administration report, in a graphic (above) and not until the 13th paragraph of this glowing piece of how well this administration is really not spending that much!

Quote from the 13th paragraph of the same Washington Post article:

"The deficit figure released by the Treasury Department for March means that the federal government has been spending more than it collected for a record 18 consecutive months, dating to the Bush administration."
Reference Here>>

The graph shows the truth of the deficits and Government spending and it is astounding that the Washington Post does not make the lead of this article that the improved spending number of $1,288,000,000,000 (1.3 trillion) is a whopping NINE TIMES larger than $158,000,000,000 ($1.6 billion) of the 2007 deficits of the Bush Administration, the first year with a Democrat Party controlled House of Representatives.

Nationally syndicated talk show host Hugh Hewitt could not have summed up how wrong this article is in its reporting of the effects of the policies of Barack Obama and the reporting job by the Washington Post.

This excerpted and edited from the blog of Hugh Hewitt -

"This is a ruinous level of spending, the sort of wildly-out-of-control hosing of printed money that could lead to a national fiscal stroke. Happy talk about a hundred billion of possible savings here and there and a reduction in earmarks should not divert attention from the fact that President Obama has led the country over a fiscal cliff, and has no solution in the offing except for a commission that will recommend vast tax hikes the prospect of which already chills investment and job growth."
Reference Here>>

In short, we all should expect a higher standard of context and truth in reports issued from our current leadership and more importantly, reporting of this information by the Fourth Estate (MSM).