Obama Utilizes A Couple Of Lib-Myths

Obama Trafficked In Debunked Liberal Myths Wednesday

Obama's partisan budget speech had a couple whoppers in it

 Craig Steiner,U.S. - President Obama's budget speech on Wednesday was remarkable in its absence of anything remotely newsworthy other than Vice-President Biden falling asleep... and remarkable in its audacity of perpetuating two debunked liberal myths: the myth of the Clinton surplus and the myth of declining income.

Myth of the Clinton Surplus

The first whopper was the unfortunate (but predictable) invocation of the liberal myth that Clinton ran a budget surplus. The president said:

"As a result of these bipartisan efforts, America's finances were in great shape by the year 2000. We went from deficit to surplus. America was actually on track to becoming completely debt-free, and we were prepared for the retirement of the Baby Boomers."

This is incorrect. As I wrote in 2007, Clinton never had a surplus. The national debt increased every year Clinton was in office without exception.

Clinton's claim to a surplus is based on smoke and mirrors and ridiculous government accounting. Clinton wasn't the only president to use this deceptive government accounting, but he was the only one that was able to claim a surplus even while debt continued to increase.

But the bottom line is that since we were further in debt at the end of every fiscal year of the Clinton administration, did we really have a surplus? Nope.

Yet Obama promoted this debunked myth.

Since I I wrote about this extensively in a separate article years ago, I won't go into it further again right now. But I would encourage everyone to be familiar with the myth of the Clinton surplus since, a decade later, it's still one of the most commonly used liberal myths when arguing matters of fiscal responsibility.

Myth of Declining Income

Obama made the claim that the vast majority of Americans--the "bottom 90%"--saw their incomes decline over the last decade. In Wednesday's speech Obama said:

"In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each."

This claim would have to be considered a derivative of the "rich got richer while the poor got poorer" liberal meme that is usually an indicator that a liberal is entering campaign season. Indeed, Obama launched his reelection campaign just last week.

This specifically caught my interest because I wrote an article back in 2006 that was based on census data that demonstrated that conventional liberal "wisdom" to be false.

So when I heard Obama make this claim during his speech, I wondered if something had changed in the years since I wrote my article. Indeed, within a few hours of Obama's speech I received an email from an individual who had read my article and wondered the same thing.

I did some research. [. . .] (read entire post here)