CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: The president used the word "honest." That's astonishing. Look, all budgets are fiction. This one is fantasia.
Look, let's start with the projections in revenue. Obama has promised to cut the deficit by the end of the first term in half. He does it by pretending that in 2011 there will be a growth in the economy of about 5.5 percent, and in the next year it will be over six. Now, these are Chinese-level numbers, and even the Chinese aren't achieving them anymore. It is completely fictional, those numbers.
Next year he says we will grow at about 3.5 percent. Next year we could still be in negative territory. And then on the cuts, he speaks about the $2 trillion in savings. And, actually, in the speech he gave to congress, he spoke of $2 trillion in savings, and now he has amended it, and he says, well, budget reduction.
And that's because half of it isn't savings at all. It's tax increases. And the other half is a fictional saving of a projected spending on Iraq, which would go out to ten years at the current levels, and have us spending in 2018 at a level that we are today that nobody expects and nobody even imagines.
So it's a saving of about a trillion and a half of Iraqi spending that would never have happened in the first place. And that's how he gets his spending cuts.