IS HE, IN FACT, NUTS?

"After years of trillion-dollar deficits we reined in spending," Barack Hussein Obama told the Wall Street CEO Council last week.  "And since I took office, we have now cut our deficits by more than half.

"Add it all and businesses like yours have created 7.8 million new jobs over the past 44 months, we’ve gone farther and recovered faster than most other advanced nations," he said.

It must have taken a great exertion of willpower for the business titans to refrain from bursting in laughter.

I suppose the president is referring to the fact that his budget for the current fiscal year (FY 2014) projects spending $3.77 trillion — about $30 billion less than was spent in FY 2013.  The savings is due primarily to the budget sequester he opposes.

But $3.77 trillion is 18.9 percent more than the $3.17 trillion spent in FY 2008, the last fiscal year for which George W. Bush was fully responsible.

The deficit projected for this fiscal year is $744 billion, the 5th largest in history.  The largest deficits ever were $1.484 trillion in FY 2009, $1.344 trillion in FY 2010, $1.322 trillion in FY 2011, and $1.18 trillion in FY 2012.

The FY 2009 deficit officially is credited to George W. Bush, because he was president when the fiscal year began.  But most of the spending — chiefly the $787 billion "stimulus" bill that didn’t stimulate — was done by Mr. Obama.

The deficit last year, $680 billion, was the sixth largest ever.  The Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits of $430 billion in FY 2015, $476 billion in FY 2016, and $535 billion in FY 2017. 

CBO’s forecast is optimistic.  In just the first 45 days of this fiscal year, $452 billion was added to the national debt.  If we keep adding debt at the current pace, the national debt could reach $22 trillion by the end of February.  It was $10.6 trillion when Mr. Obama took office.

Fewer new jobs have been added than were lost during the Great Recession (7.9 million).  Half the jobs lost during the recession paid middle class wages ($38,000 to $68,000).  Only about 2 percent of the jobs added since pay that well.  Most of the jobs added this year are part time.  This is chiefly a consequence of Obamacare.

Officially, 204,000 jobs were added in October.  But the working age population grew by 213,000, so job growth didn’t keep pace with population growth.  And 932,000 adults left the labor force, the biggest one month decline since 2009.  At the end of October, 735,000 fewer Americans had jobs than when the month began.

The average number of jobs gained per month (177,000) is anemic compared to earlier recoveries.  During just one month of the Reagan recovery (August 1983) more jobs were created (1.114 million) than were created in the last six months.  There’ve been 11 recessions since WWII.  Had the economy grown at just the average rate for every other recovery, ten million more Americans would have jobs.

The official unemployment rate (U3) for October was 7.3 percent.  It’s never been below 7.2 percent in any month during Mr. Obama’s presidency, the longest period of sustained high unemployment since the Great Depression.

More than 11 million Americans have stopped looking for work during Mr. Obama’s presidency. The labor force participation rate fell in October to 62.8 percent, the lowest since March, 1978.  If all discouraged workers and those underemployed were added to the official number, the unemployment rate for October would have been 23.5 percent, calculated John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics. 

During the Reagan recovery, the unemployment rate plunged even though labor force participation  increased substantially.

To recap: Barack Hussein Obama has spent far more than any president ever before, to little effect. The Obama "recovery" is the weakest in postwar history.  The real unemployment rate is at a level not seen since the Great Depression.

President Obama is chiefly responsible for the largest federal budget deficit ever, entirely responsible for the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth largest deficits.  The national debt will double on his watch.

That’s a rather different picture than the portrait of fiscal responsibility he painted last week.  And the people he was trying to blow smoke past weren’t mathematically challenged 20-something Obamabots who think history began the day they were born.  They’re business executives who know the real score.

Obama wasn’t trying to con an audience of lo-fo’s.  To make his fiscal claims to the nation’s top business execs is evidence of an estrangement from reality that could be pathological.

So this attempt to deceive doesn’t raise questions about the president’s integrity.  Those were answered by his Obamacare lies.  It raises questions about his sanity.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.