In last night's "Prime Time Press Conference" the Dear Leader promised that he would "cut the deficit in half" by the end of his first term. Sounds like a good thing, right? Wow, he's going to cut something bad that starts with a "d" in half! With all the bad financial news lately, this sounds like dramatically good news. Not so fast. Sit down, take a deep breath and pay close attention.

It is astonishing to me how many paid journalists seem to confuse the two "d" words, "debt" and "deficit." Most of us know what a debt is. If we owe somebody something, that's a debt. If I borrowed a cup of sugar from you and said I would give it back next week, that's a debt of one cup of sugar. If I borrowed $100,000 from a bank to buy a condo, that's a debt of $100,000. Right now, the U.S. has a debt of a little over eleven Trillion dollars. That "little over" is $41.7 Billion as of Monday March 23rd, according to the Treasury Office. For lots of scary truth visit "http://www.federalbudget.com/"

OK, what's a deficit? It's the opposite of a surplus. The deficit is the amount that you are increasing the debt in a given fiscal year. A "deficit budget" is a budget that spends more money than it takes in. A "budget deficit" is the amount by which spending exceeds revenue. Not too complicated, is it?

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the 2009 budget deficit will be $1.85 Trillion. The Administration estimates that it will be "only" $1.75 Trillion. Let's split the difference and call it $1.8 Trillion. President Obama says that, by the end of his first term, he will cut that deficit in half. We'll be spending $900 Billion more each year than we take in. In other words, we'll be increasing the national debt by almost a Trillion dollars a year.

Gosh, that doesn't sound quite as great as it did when he said it last night. Even if he can bring the deficit down that much by then, which many experts doubt, he'll still be digging our financial grave twice as fast as G.W. Bush's record year of 2008 when the deficit was a paltry $459 Billion.

Stop helping us, President Obama. You're just making things worse.

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 [Debt or Deficit... hunh?]

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