In a Washington Examiner article this weekend, Barbara Boland reported on President Obama’s latest weekly radio address, which included his observations on the 50th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid.
A video of President Obama’s address is available here.
Watching the video is a little disorienting. It seems like President Obama is talking to us, but he is also looking at somebody else, or something else, like a teleprompter, right next to us.
Not to make a mountain out of a molehill. But when this practice arrives in a communication that is apparently designed in part to show how natural and genuine our President can be in talking with us, it might raise questions about credibility more generally – including the nuts and bolts about the President’s assertions about the financial status of these programs.
At about 1:40 (one minute and forty seconds) into the address, President Obama takes note of those who call the finances for these programs a ‘crisis,’ and says those calls tend to be driven by people who want to cut their funding, privatize them, or phase them out entirely.
At Truth in Accounting, goals like this do not play a role in our concern for these programs, or our concern for the truthfulness of government budget and accounting practices that can mask their cost and undermine their long-term stability.
Here’s an op-ed Sheila Weinberg of Truth in Accounting recently wrote in the Houston Chronicle, describing our concerns a little more completely.