Karl Rove accused President Obama of misleading the American people on deficit reduction when the GOP operative and Fox employee denied that Obama “has met the Republicans more than halfway” on the deficit.Rove was repeating a bogus piece of spin from GOP leadership -- on the whole, deficit reduction under the Obama administration has actually been heavily tilted towards spending cuts.

When Happening Now guest host Rick Folbaum asked Rove if Obama had “met the Republicans more than halfway,” as the president has said, Rove replied, “He has not met the Republicans halfway. The Republicans gave him $600 billion in additional revenue at the end of the year on the fiscal cliff deal.” Rove continued: “The president during the campaign said we ought to have, he had TV ads, saying there ought to be two and a half dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in new revenue. So he's got to come up with about $1.5 trillion in spending reductions, and there's nowhere near that in this budget.”

Rove is trying to pull a fast one on Fox's viewers by omitting the crucial fact that Obama signed $1.5 trillion in spending cuts into law in 2011 as part of the Budget Control Act. Those cuts are legally binding and are in place today. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “these reductions will shrink non-defense discretionary spending to its lowest level on record as a share of GDP, with data going back to 1962.” As Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein has written, “you can't pretend the BCA cuts didn't happen.”

This CBPP chart shows the balance between spending cuts and revenue increases signed into law since 2011:

Rove is not the only one trying to tell the American people that post-2010 spending cuts never happened. By starting the timer at the beginning of 2013 and ignoring Obama's actual record on deficit reduction, Rove is parroting GOP House Speaker John Boehner, who said last week that “the president got his tax hikes on the wealthy with no corresponding spending cuts.”