President Obama’s Language of “Savings”

President Obama’s claim that he will cut $1.1 trillion dollars from the deficit over the next decade is political sophistry at best (sophistry: a plausible but misleading or fallacious argument), outright deception at worst. Why? Well, the inconvenient truth is that his policies will increase the national debt by about $1 trillion per year over the next decade. So in reality, President Obama’s is “saving” $1 trillion by only adding $10 trillion dollars to the national debt instead of $11 trillion.

Try this type of saving at home sometime and see how it works out. Tell your spouse that you are going to save $1,000 by only adding $10,000 in debt on a credit card instead of $11,000. If your spouse doesn’t get it, you will have to patiently explain to him or her that this type of sophisticated fiscal policy can be complicated, and that’s why we have the experts in Washington, D.C to help us.

This budget “savings” song and dance reminds me of President Obama’s nonsensical claim that he will save or create 3.5 million jobs, or whatever the latest number is. To say that he will save or create jobs is essentially meaningless, for how can anyone know when a job is “saved.” You can’t of course, so although the economy has been losing jobs over the past year, President Obama could at any time claim that he has met his goal by saving millions of jobs that would otherwise have been lost.

If that last sentence is a little hard to digest, well, I believe that is exactly the purpose of these word games. Many people are likely to believe that we are making progress in saving money or jobs because that is what the headlines tell them. Never mind about the devil in the details, we are supposed to trust the pronouncements and believe that we are headed in the right direction.

It is long past time to call this Orwellian use of language what it is, political fraud. It is not helping our nation, it is hurting it by constantly obfuscating the real issues. Issues such as the national debt and the loss of jobs that are not going to go away simply through the clever misuse of language.