US lawmaker: Obama budget makes US worse than Cuba

(Breitbart.com) - President Barack Obama's 3.55-trillion-dollar budget plan will leave the United States with a worse budget deficit than Cuba, a leading Republican critic warned Tuesday.

"This creates for us a higher deficit than Cuba's. This is not the kind of position we want to put the United States in," Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters.

Other Republican critics of Obama's spending policies, including his nearly 800-billion-dollar economic stimulus package, have variously warned that he risks turning the country into Argentina, France, Germany, or Zimbabwe.

Asked for the figures underpinning the charge, a McConnell aide pointed to a report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office that warned the US budget deficit for fiscal year 2009, ending September 30, would swell to 13.1 percent of Gross Domestic Product.

Cuba's deficit in 2008 was 4.1 percent of GDP using the official exchange rate, or 1.57 percent using another measure of total national output, according to the CIA.

According to official Cuban government figures, Cuba's projected deficit in 2009 will run to 5.6 percent of GDP, less than the 6.7 percent it reached in 2008.