White House Press Secretary Jay Carney today responded to criticisms made by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) regarding President Obama’s new budget.
Boehner and other GOP leaders have dismissed the $3.8 trillion budget plan, arguing that it sets spending levels too high.
“I would simply, in response to the Speaker’s comments, marvel at his silence during the years that President Obama’s predecessor was racking up huge deficits,” Carney said to reporters traveling with the president aboard Air Force One. “I’m pretty sure that Speaker Boehner went along with policies that put two wars on a credit card, that led to the passage of a wholly unpaid-for addition to the Medicare entitlement. He helped lead the effort to pass two massive and unpaid-for tax cuts. These are the policies that led to — a situation where budget surpluses were in place for as far as the eye could see in January of 2001, eight years later led to massive deficits.”
Carney later argued that Obama’s economic policies have reversed a negative trend of job loss that started under Bush.
