By Gordon Bishop
The Obama Administration is playing games with numbers when it comes to balancing the federal budget.
Obama first says he downgraded his own evaluation of the U.S. economy late last month, issuing an updated budget that showed slower growth than he'd projected just five months ago.
In a report issued a few days later, the White House said it expects gross domestic product to grow at a rate of 4.3 percent in 2012 and 2013, or down three-tenths and four-tenths of a point, respectively.
The downgrade extended through 2015, signaling a slower-than-expected recovery well into the next president's term.
The numbers come as Obama is battling for re-election this November against Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who is arguing on the campaign trail that the president deserves blame for not having pulled the country out of its slump yet.
The updated budget also showed the federal government will run a deficit of $1.2 trillion this year, and will again flirt with a trillion-dollar shortfall next year.
If those projections come true, it would be the first straight year the government has run that deeply in the red -- a level it had never reached until 2009, his first year as "president."
The deficit for 2013 is now projected to be $991, which is nearly 10 percent deeper than projected in February when Obama sent his budget to Congress.
Jeffrey Zeints, Obama's acting budget director, blamed Republicans for a sluggish economy he said is hurting the fiscal picture-- but he said the White House is still counting on Congress to pass the president's tax plan and his outline for more spending on state and local governments, for example, which Democrats say will boost the economy.
Democrats boosting the economy? Democrats are tax-and-spend losers who have gotten us in this financial mess in the first place.
In the report, the White House said the deeper deficits next year are because taxes are running lower than expected and because some of the president's stimulus payments have been pushed off until 2013.
The deficit in 2008, President George W. Bush's last full year in office, was $459 billion -- which was then a record.
In fiscal 2009, which covered the last four months of Mr. Bush's term and the first eight months of the Obama's term, the deficit ballooned to $1.4 trillion as the government coped with the Wall Street crisis.
Since then deficits have remained stubbornly high, totaling $1.3 trillion in 2010 and 2011 and projected to reach $1.2 trillion this year.
Across that full decade, the country will rack up deficits of $6.4 trillion.
This is what happens when a President who was elected by 13 states where there was major fraud voting by ACORN, Obama's thugs from South Chicago, the most crooked city in America.
What Obama has done is what most people will say, "Bankrupting America."
The only way America can survive is when Obama is booted out of the White House.
(Gordon Bishop is a national award winning author, historian, syndicated columnist and New Jersey's First "Journalist-of-the-Year--1986, New Jersey Press Association, founded in 1845.)
