Thursday, June 30, 2011

Obama cutting through the Red Tape..And Stretching the Truth



President Obama's press conference yesterday has certainly caused a bit of a stir in the political world and among the chief issues was the President's comments on the economy and his finger-pointing at Congress for not coming to any major agreements on the national debt and the upcoming debt limit.

While I won't get into the entire can of worms the President opened up, one of his comments did catch my eye, and apparently caught the eyes of the good people at Politifact.com.

Specifically, President Obama claimed this during his speech yesterday:


"What I have done -- and this is unprecedented, by the way; no administration has done this before -- is I've said to each agency, 'Don't just look at current regulations or don't just look at future regulations, regulations that we're proposing. Let's go backwards and look at regulations that are already on the books and if they don't make sense, let's get rid of them.'"

Now when I first heard that I immediately wondered, "really?" Politifact apparently wondered the same thing and checked..And it turns out the President fibbed just a tad.

It turns out during President Clinton's presidency, he too tried to cut through the government red tape when it came to regulations and had some success through the creation of National Partnership for Reinventing Government. This group, headed by then Vice President Al Gore, succeeded in removing some 16,000 pages from the federal books.

Not only that but previous Presidents have also some kind of attempts at re-evaluating and removing regulations over the last few days which makes the President's claim not only outright false but also rather bold in its falsehood. Not only that, but as far as I know, the President has yet to actually show any progress on getting rid of unnecessary regulations even though he has talked about it for a few years now.

Just goes to show, our President is no better than his potential Presidential challengers when it comes to "wandering from the truth"..

Kudos to Politifact
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/29/barack-obama/obama-claims-his-regulatory-review-unprecedented/

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