ABC News and The Washington Post have both separately confirmed that President Obama’s Chief of Staff Jack Lew made false claims on CNN and Meet the Press this weekend regarding Senate Democrats’ inability to pass a budget. Whether or not Lew intentionally lied on national television or just made the same exact error twice is up for debate. But this is not the first Lew has made bogus statements about the budget.
Last year, Lew also told the public: “Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt.”
This is also false. According the Congressional Budget Office, Obama’s 2012 budget:
- Never saw an annual deficit below $748 billion
- Doubled the debt in ten years
- Saw annual interest payments on the debt approach $1 trillion
Watch Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., grill Lew on his false statements above.
