President Obama repeated the false claim that he had put forward a budget that would reduce the federal deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade in the first presidential debate Wednesday night in Denver, Colo.
The plan has been debunked by the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler who called the claim "simply not accurate," writing that "virtually no serious budget analyst agreed" with the administration's accounting.
The Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this week on Obama's false claims about his budget proposal:
Independent experts panned the president’s budget for its "troubling" reliance on gimmicks and accounting tricks to inflate the magnitude of the savings being proposed.
Keith Hennessey, a former director of the National Economic Council, estimated the true value of Obama’s deficit reduction—minus these gimmicks—to be about $2.8 trillion, and called even that reduced figure a "generous" assessment.
The president’s budget, for instance, takes credit for about $1 trillion in spending cuts that were already signed into law in 2011, and should already be incorporated given that they fall outside the 10-year budget window.
The budget also includes another $800 billion in phantom savings related to the military drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan—money that would never have been spent to begin with—and another $800 billion in projected savings due to reduced interest payments on the debt, something not traditionally cited in federal budget documents as a form of government "spending" that can be "cut."