 | | | | | | | | | | White House Manipulates the Truth
Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has a new memoir, which provides us with some insight into how the White House operates. It seems as though the White House is more of a perpetual spin-zone, rather than an executive office of leadership. In his book, Geithner describes an exchange with top White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer over the budget negotiations in 2011. While preparing to make appearances on the Sunday shows, Pfieffer did not want Geithner to say that Social Security contributed to our federal deficit. The only problem is that this is untrue. As Geithner explains, "It wasn't a main driver of our future deficits, but it did contribute." Geithner goes on to explain, "Pfeiffer said the line was a 'dog whistle' to the left, a phrase I had never heard before. He had to explain that the phrase was code to the Democratic base, signaling that we intended to protect Social Security."
What we have here is the White House telling the treasuring secretary to lie, or at least to not tell the truth. The first question we must ask is why the White House thinks it can get away with this? Clearly it is banking on the ignorance of the American people, hoping that if the lies are small enough, no one will notice or call them out on it.
Other Big Lies
Timothy Geithner's revelations begs the question, how many other lies has this administration told in order to bend the truth in their favor? We know some of the big lies: "If you like your plan, you can keep you plan," there was not a "smidgen" of corruption in the IRS targeting scandal, the White House did not have a hand in substantively crafting the infamous Benghazi talking points. What other lies, big and small, has the administration been responsible for? I mentioned Ron Fournier's piece on some of the revelations in Geithner's book. This part of Geithner's book doesn't paint Obama in a great light, showing him to be a weak leader who is willing to resign to the political partisanship of his party rather than rise above and lead on the big issues, such as the national debt. That also plays into another Obama pattern. In addition to the lies, Obama leads from behind both domestically and abroad.
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| | |   | | | Here We Go Again
Are you ready for another dire, doom-and-gloom campaign on the part of the Obama administration? This next one is over the Highway Trust Fund. Within a few months, the Highway Trust Fund will basically run out of money. This fund is the billions of federal dollars that are doled out to states to build roads, bridges and maintain infrastructure. The trust fund is running low because the government hasn't collected enough gas-tax revenue. Why is that? Because cars have become more fuel efficient, so people aren't buying as much gas! By striving to improve fuel economy and save our environment, the government has created another problem for itself: declining tax revenues. Just today it was reported that the IRS spent nearly $100 million on new office furniture. We can start right there – rather than new desks for IRS employee, let's build a bridge in Boise. Let's divert the billions that are being paid to ObamaCare contractors whose employees are sitting around literally doing nothing and use that money more productively on our infrastructure. The point is that the government wastes enough money that it ought to be able to fund something as fundamental as infrastructure with what we already pay in taxes. But instead, secretary Foxx wants "a set of ideas that increase annual investment." In other words, he wants more taxes. Par for the course in Washington. |
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