Interesting Lines from Obama's Press Conference

What I've said here in Washington is that we've got to make some tough choices. We've got to make some tough budgetary choices.

Tough budgetary choices? Since Obama seems unwilling to cut anything out of his agenda, I wonder what he is referring to. He went sky-high on his budget, including record deficits and tripling the current national debt within 10 years. So, where are the tough choices?

And I've said that we've got to start driving our deficit numbers down.

Um, how do you plan to do that when your own projections are for 7 trillion in deficits in the next 10 years? That is not driving the deficit down. And let me tell you, raising taxes into the stratosphere won't get you there either.

Now, we never expected, when we printed out our budget, that they would simply Xerox it and vote on it. We assume that it has to go through the legislative process.

This statement seems to be contradicted by the fact that he is trying to get the budget passed by the House on a single vote, without any changes.

First of all, I suspect that some of those Republican critics have a short memory, because, as I recall, I'm inheriting a $1.3 trillion deficit, annual deficit, from them. That would be point number one.

First, here's the same finger pointing and petty politics that Obama said he was going to Washington to change. Second, it is a bit dishonest to say he was inheriting a $1.3 trillion annual budget deficit. That number was the deficit for last year, which was a year of bailouts. The deficit for the previous year was around $500 billion - not great, but much lower than what Obama is going to institute. To claim a $1 trillion annual deficit per year for 10 years is reducing the deficit is so intellectually dishonest that it is embarrassing.

Both under our estimates and under the CBO estimates, both -- the most conservative estimates out there, we drive down the deficit over the first five years of our budget. The deficit is cut in half.

Again, very misleading. A deficit of $700 billion per year is still higher than anything George W Bush had in all but his last year in office. And there are no projected bailouts in that budget, which means it is nothing more than a growth in government spending. It is an increase in the deficit, not a reduction!

But it is going to be an impossible task for us to balance our budget if we're not taking on rising health care costs

Obviously, most everyone agrees for a need to reduce health care costs. But you are not going to balance the budget by instituting universal health care, which is what Obama is calling for. Revamp the health care system, yes. Government run (and funded) health care, no.

What we said was that, over the last decade, the average worker, the average family have seen their wages and incomes flat. Even in times where supposedly we were in the middle of an economic boom, as a practical matter, their incomes didn't go up.

That's actually not true. When you include benefits like health insurance payments, retirement payments and other benefits to employees (and not just straight salary), the pay for the average worker has gone up dramatically in the past 30 years.

Question: But on AIG, why did you wait -- why did you wait days to come out and express that outrage? It seems like the action is coming out of New York and the attorney general's office. It took you days to come public with Secretary Geithner and say, "Look, we're outraged." Why did it take so long?

Obama: It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak.

Sigh