Romney says Obama promised to cut deficit in half

At the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney said President Barack Obama had broken an important promise.

"You've been president four years," Romney said at the Oct. 3, 2012, debate in Denver. "You said you'd cut the deficit in half. It's now four years later. We still have trillion-dollar deficits. The CBO says we'll have a trillion-dollar deficit each of the next four years. …"

He added, "I mean, you have said before you'd cut the deficit in half. And this -- I love this idea of $4 trillion in cuts. You found $4 trillion of ways to reduce or to get closer to a balanced budget, except we still show trillion-dollar deficits every year. That doesn't get the job done."

We’ve heard the claim before that Obama promised to cut the deficit in half. Let’s review our findings.

Remarks from 2009

Obama indeed made the pledge on Feb. 23, 2009, following a "Fiscal Responsibility Summit" one month after his inauguration.

His words: "Today I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office. Now, this will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we've long neglected. But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay, and that means taking responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control."

He said then that the nation’s $1.3 trillion deficit was the largest in the nation’s history. That figure was mostly unchanged through fiscal year 2011.
   
In 2012? It’s expected to be $1.1 trillion, according to the nonpartisan researchers at the Congressional Budget Office in an August 2012 report.
   
The estimate marks the fourth year in a row with a deficit of more than $1 trillion, the CBO noted, although the projection is down slightly from the $1.2 trillion deficit that CBO projected in March.

"This year’s deficit will be three-quarters as large as the deficit in 2009 when measured relative to the size of the economy," the report noted.

So the deficit is shrinking, but it’s nowhere near half the level from 2009.

PolitiFact Florida previously asked the Obama campaign about the pledge. The campaign pointed us to Obama’s response when asked about it by an Atlanta TV station in February 2012.

"Well, we're not there because this recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized," he said. "Everybody who is out there back in 2009, if you look back at what their estimates were in terms of how many jobs had been lost, how bad the economy had contracted when I took office, everybody underestimated it. …"

Our ruling

Romney reminded Obama during the debate, "you have said before you'd cut the deficit in half."

The statement is accurate. Obama made the pledge shortly after taking office in 2009. Today, the deficit is smaller, but it’s not half the size it was. We rate Romney’s statement True.