Under Kaine’s DNC Watch, Federal Debt Actually Rose By $2 Trillion AFTER Democrats Passed “Pay-Go”

In another reminder of why it will be important for the Virginia and national media to closely fact-check Tim Kaine’s revisionist history on the campaign trail over the next 16 months, the former Chairman of the Democrat National Committee told another whopper yesterday.

In an interview with NBC-Richmond, Chairman Kaine claimed it is hypocritical for Republicans to oppose raising the debt ceiling by another $2 trillion and claimed that if so-called “pay as you go” – known as “Pay-Go” – spending restrictions had been in place, our debt crisis might have been averted.

• Chairman Kaine: “If the pay-go restriction had been put in place, much of the issues that we are dealing with, with the deficit today, might not have even been issues that we had to deal with… The only thing that’s changed is it’s a different President and they’ve decided they’re going to use this leverage in a different way.”

Fact Check, Mr. Chairman… 

Under Tim Kaine’s watch at the DNC, Congressional Democrats actually had “Pay-Go” rules in place, yet the federal debt still skyrocketed by another $2 trillion – from $12.3 trillion to $14.3 trillion – in just TWO years.  

Why?  Because as Republicans pointed out at the time, the Democrats tacked on a wide range of exemptions that allowed them to bypass the law – for example, if they deemed the spending to be an “emergency.”  Even the Democrats’ massive stimulus bill that Tim Kaine cheerleaded through Congress was not subject to “Pay-Go.”

As noted by the Wall Street Journal in 2009:

Paygo is “very simple,” the President claimed. “Congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere.”  That’s what Democrats also promised in 2006, with Nancy Pelosi vowing that “the first thing” House Democrats would do if they took Congress was reimpose paygo rules that “Republicans had let lapse.” By 2008, Speaker Pelosi had let those rules lapse no fewer than 12 times, to make way for $400 billion in deficit spending. Mr. Obama repeated the paygo pledge during his 2008 campaign, and instead we have witnessed the greatest peacetime spending binge in U.S. history. As a share of GDP, spending will hit an astonishing 28.5% in fiscal 2009, with the deficit hitting 13% and projected to stay at 4% to 5% for years to come.

And as Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill reported in February 2010, “[t]his year, facing record deficits and a debt that has exceeded $12 trillion, Democrats touted the new pay-go requirements as a necessary step to get spending under wraps. President Barack Obama signed the pay-go bill into law on Feb. 12 and Democrats are ready to waive those requirements to help get the economy going.”

“Tim Kaine is simply not being honest about the reckless spending and record debt that he helped champion during his time in Washington,” National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) spokesman Chris Bond said today.  “The reality is that the federal debt skyrocketed by $2 trillion in just two years after the Democrats passed their so-called ‘Pay-Go’ legislation.  So we hope that Virginia voters and reporters will ask Tim Kaine how he squares those facts with his partisan attacks yesterday.”

KAINE-OBAMA PAY-GO: Rhetoric Vs. Reality

RHETORIC

PRESIDENT OBAMA: “We Have Not Done A Good Job Being Good Fiscal Stewards. And So What I Want To Do Is, First Of All, Institute Something Called PAYGO. It’s a very simple principle. It means you pay as you go. If you want to start a new program, then you’ve got to cut an old program that doesn’t work. If you want to give a tax cut to somebody, then you’ve got to eliminate an old tax cut that isn’t serving its purpose. So we are going to make sure that everything we do we pay for.” (Sen. Obama, Remarks At Campaign Event, Billings, MT, 5/19/08)

PRESIDENT OBAMA: “I Believe In PAYGO. If I Start A New Program I Will Pay For It.” (Sen. Obama, Remarks, New York City, NY, 3/27/08)

CHAIRMAN TIM KAINE:  “If the pay-go restriction had been put in place, much of the issues that we are dealing with, with the deficit today, might not have even been issues that we had to deal with.” (NBC-Richmond Interview, 7/14/11)

REALITY

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE: “Fine, Except The New $825 Billion Stimulus Package Goes Around Pay-As-You-Go Rules.” “About an hour after the inauguration, I went to the new whitehouse.gov Web site. Obama’s five-point plan to restore fiscal discipline starts with items that already are history – the bad way. Reinstate PAYGO rules. Fine, except the new $825 billion stimulus package goes around pay-as-you-go rules. And while the PAYGO rules remain, they’re so bendable that Congress bypassed PAYGO for the $810 billion bailout, the Alternative Minimum Tax tweak, the energy bill, the pork-fest farm bill and more.” (“Obama’s Era Of Responsibility,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1/22/09) 

FLASHBACK 

RHETORIC

SEN. HARRY REID (D-NV): “I Feel Very Strongly That We Should Offer An Amendment Dealing With PAYGO So That, As We Had During The Clinton Years, If You’re Going To Have A New Program, It Has To Be Paid For.” (Sen. Harry Reid, Press Conference, 3/7/06)

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): “We Want To Have ‘Pay Go’, No New Deficit Spending.” (CNN’s “Newsroom,” 1/7/06)

SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): “And You Want To Spend Them? You Should Pay For Them. And We Democrats Have Tried To Do That. For The First Year, We Have PAYGO.” (Sen. Schumer, Press Conference, 10/24/07)

REALITY

WALL STREET JOURNAL: “…Paygo Has Been A Farce From The Get-Go, Tossed Aside When Convenient This Year And Last.” (Editorial, “Political War Games,” The Wall Street Journal, 5/16/08)

ROLL CALL: “So Far In The 110th Congress, Democrats Have Added Hundreds Of Billions In Unpaid-For Spending On The Wars, Tax Cuts And Domestic Programs While Trying To Claim Credit For Reinstituting A PAYGO Rule, Albeit One That Is So Weak That Democrats Have Been Able To All But Ignore It. Last year, Democrats forced through an alternative minimum tax relief package without offsets over the objections of Blue Dogs, and this year, they passed a massive bipartisan stimulus package without offsets as well.” (“Blue Dogs Face $52B Test,” Roll Call, 5/12/08)