Northwest Indiana Discussion

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Obama Personally Approved Use of Budget Gimmickry To Hide Billions From Cost Of Obamacare

The president prided himself on honesty in his first budget proposal, including the real estimated costs of spending, but Obama later shifted his stance and approved the use of budget gimmickry, according to The New Yorker.

When his aides suggested in late 2009 that he should abandon the honest approach on estimated spending on disaster aid, for example, the president signed off, The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza reports. Obama also approved of fanciful budget numbers on his signature health care legislation, Lizza wrote:

In the December 20th memo, [Obama aides] resorted to gimmickry…On disaster relief, for example, he had estimated that the government would need twenty billion dollars a year, a figure based on the statistical likelihood of major disasters requiring federal aid.

Now Obama’s aides reminded him that Congress had ignored his “ ‘honest budgeting’ approach,” and perhaps they should, too. They proposed “$5 billion per year for disaster costs.” Obama drew [a] check mark.

The White House could also save billions by fiddling with the way it presented savings from Obama’s health-care-reform bill. Check.

White House Budget Director Guts Legal Case for Obamacare


Testifying before Congress this morning, President Obama's acting budget director Jeffrey Zients directly undercut one of the administration's key legal defenses of its national health care law as it nears a hearing before the Supreme Court.

In a hearing of the House Budget Committee Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., pressed Zients on whether the penalty that the health care law imposes on individuals who do not purchase health insurance constitutes a tax. Eventually, Zients said it did not.

But this directly contradicts one of the arguments the Obama administration is making before the Supreme Court in defense of the health care law, which is that the mandate is Constitutional because it's a tax and government has taxing power.

This has always been a tricky argument for the Obama administration, because admitting that the mandate is a tax means that Obama violated his pledge not to raise taxes on those earning less than $250,000. In September 2009, Obama told ABC's George Stephanapoulos that the mandate was not a tax. But by the following June, his administration was arguing in court that it was.

Now the administration is making both arguments simultaneously. Before Congress, Zients is arguing that it is not a tax. But before the Supreme Court next month, the administration will argue that it is, in fact, a tax.