At his press conference today, President Obama showed that he either thinks he can pull the wool over Americans’ eyes through the sheer force of his own outrageous rhetoric, or else he really believes his own rhetoric and is living in a fantasyland. The guess here is that it’s a roughly even mix of the two.

At his press conference, Obama claimed responsibility for “about $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction over the past two years.”  But the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that we’ve actually racked up $2.386 trillion in new deficit spending over the past two years.  What’s more, that colossal 2-year tally is more than the combined deficit spending we racked up during the four years of World War II — in inflation-adjusted dollars (see White House table 1.3).