Tonight’s presidential debate, the second of three, might feel a little like déjà vu for viewers, hearkening back to the 2008 town hall debate. Here’s a look back at four promises Obama made — and didn’t keep — during that debate.
1) “I’m cutting more than I’m spending.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXxrqgY9I_Q]
A Comeback America Initiative chart from June of this year reveals this to be false. In fact, Obama has spent more federal money than any of the previous five presidents, U.S. News and World Report found. Under the Obama administration, federal spending has been 24 percent of the GDP, higher than it has been since 1946, when America was recovering from WWII. Obama’s first major act in office was the federal stimulus, what Forbes calls “the most expensive single piece of legislation in history up to that point.”
2) “I want to go line-by-line through every item in the federal budget and eliminate programs that don’t work and make sure that those that do work, work better and cheaper.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX8fxCJLFZM]
A Heritage Foundation report, just released today, shows Obamacare alone will increase federal health spending by 15 percent. Obama is planning $716 billion in cuts to Medicare spending to offset $1.7 trillion in new spending for coverage expansion provisions in Obamacare. The Medicare chief actuary says these cuts are not sustainable and the deficit is likely to increase, according to the Heritage report. So much for making a program work cheaper.
3) “We’re going to have a take on entitlements, and I think we got to do it quickly. We’re going to have a lot of work to do, so I can’t guarantee that we’re gonna do it within the next two years, but I’d like to do it during my first term as president.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P13lpN5S-ao]
Obama certainly did not do anything within the first two years of his presidency to reform entitlements. In 2009, with support from the then-Democrat-controlled Congress, Obama passed a $40 billion SCHIP entitlement program expansion, Forbes reported in the same article.
4) “If we create a new energy economy, we can create 5 million new job, easily, here in the United States.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-u2v0aFgLQ]
The lingering unanswered question, and one that GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan asked in the Thursday night’s debate, is where are the 5 million green jobs? A 2010 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that only 3.1 million jobs could be classified as green. This falls short of Obama’s promised number, but even worse, most of those jobs were just reclassified and are not new, as Townhall reports, which leaves only 9,245 new green jobs.
(h/t Buzzfeed)
