There's No Minimizing this News

It's standard operating procedure in D.C. When a politician has bad or embarrassing news to report, they wait until as late as possible on Friday and release said news. That's exactly what happened yesterday.

The Obama administration will raise its 10-year budget deficit projection to approximately $9 trillion from $7.108 trillion in a report next week, a senior administration official told Reuters on Friday.

The higher deficit figure, based on updated economic data, brings the White House budget office into line with outside estimates and gives further fuel to President Barack Obama's opponents, who say his spending plans are too expensive in light of budget shortfalls.

The president can try and minimize this all he wants but he just laid another financial and political nuclear bomb on himself, our economy, and our political dynamics.

I would call this the death knell of health care reform but that is already dead. In fact, I would call this death knell for his entire agenda but that also died with the health care overhaul. In fact, all this does advance the decline of the President's job approval and guarantees that the majority of polls will have him below 50% before the end of September.

For a president who campaigned on on being in tune with the thoughts and worries of the people, President Obama has certainly shown an unbelievably quick loss of touch with the worries and thoughts of the electorate. While he pushes forward with health care reform, the electorate is most concerned with the massive deficit that he is predicting.

That was, of course, before the President revealed that in fact his deficit would grow at $200 billion a year more quickly than he first predicted. Let's remember a few things. It was, fairly so, universally agreed that the Bush years were filled with fiscal irresponsibility. Yet, during those years, the biggest budget deficit wasn't quite $550 billion. Now, Obama is stipulating that his deficit projections are $200 billion short.

While the president presses full speed ahead on health care reform, the public is mostly concerned with the budget deficit currently being created by a plethora of spending projects including health care reform. So, the public doesn't believe for one second that health care reform will be "budget neutral". Nothing Obama has done has been budget neutral. So, on the one hand President Obama lays on the public a future in which our deficit grows by nearly $1 trillion yearly and on the other, he wants the public to also accept a budget busting health care reform. Like I said, this would be the death knell if it wasn't already dead.