Presidential candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich remained cordial during a dialogue about entitlements and government policy Saturday when talking about Herman Cain, but he used some fightin’ words when commenting on the honesty of President Obama and the federal government.
“This president is about as candid and accurate as Bernie Madoff in what he tells the American people,” Gingrich said in the context of Social Security reforms, adding “this whole way that Congress and Washington deal with social security is a fraud and a lie, and it’s because of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and it’s because of the unified budget.”
Gingrich used the CBO as a punching bag throughout the night. “If you’re serious about real health reform, abolish the Congressional Budget Office,” he said. “It is a dishonest institution which routinely plans things the wrong way.”
The CBO frustrated conservatives as an institution that could be manipulated even into calling Obamacare a deficit-reducing piece of legislation. For instance, CBO said that the CLASS Act — decried by Republicans as a fundamentally flawed program — would reduce deficits by $70 billion over 10 years; the Department of Health and Human Services recently acknowledged that the program cannot operate. The problem, despite some lawmakers’ far-flung claims, is that the program would be fine for exactly ten years, since it was able to collect premiums for five of them before paying out a dime in benefits.
“So, again and again, their answer is bigger government, higher taxes, more bureaucracy,” Gingrich said of the CBO, “and it makes it almost impossible to get the kind of reforms we would bring in from the private sector.”
