The Obama Deficit Lie

President Barack Obama and Democratic Congressional leaders have hypocritically promised since taken office in January that are going to be “deficit hawks”. We have not even reached the one-year anniversary of the Inauguration and the same Democratic leaders are raising the debt ceiling by $1.8 trillion. The national debt is already nearing $12.1 trillion and the economic geniuses in DC have realized that their historic deficit spending has made it imperative to raise the ceiling.

The federal deficit for last fiscal year that ended at the end of September was around $1.4 trillion. To put that into perspective, the federal budget for all of 2008 was $2.9 trillion. To be fair, and to prevent my left-leaning friends from hyperventilating, some of that deficit belongs to President Bush, but in the first 2 months of this fiscal year the Obama administration has spent $296.7 billion in the red. Project that out for the next 12 months and the 2010 federal deficit will be about $1.8 trillion. Of course we have to consider that the “emergency” stimulus spending has not really even started to be spent.

Based on President Obama’s penchant for socialist government, you can guarantee his response to the crippling deficit and ever-increasing debt will be to raise taxes. His tax increases will be “targeted” towards only the “rich”, but it will soon become apparent that the definition of rich will be continually redefined until the majority of the middle class will be hit as well. Of course the net result of his tax hikes will be an even bigger hit to the economy than his disastrous policies have already been. "There is no such thing as government money - only taxpayer money." William Weld

The bureaucrats in Washington have expelled so much hot air making promises about deficits, bailouts, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and health care that if I believed in the global warming hoax, I would be worried about a real life Day After Tomorrow. Thank God the carbon dioxide being spewed out in DC has no effect on our climate. Unfortunately the idiotic economic policies coming out of Washington will have lasting effects that our children and grandchildren will feel. To borrow a line from the President’s campaign, “It is time for Change!”

More Political Posturing By Obama On Spending

President Barack Obama has decided that all of this reckless spending has to stop. He has told Congress that they must now cut $1 from somewhere else in the budget for every $1 that they spend. The concept is not an original idea; in 2006 the Democrats gained control of Congress with promises to turn the tide of Republican spending. They promised to never introduce a spending measure without a means to pay for it. Of course, in the 2 years following their takeover of Congress they simply ignored their own rules. They added $398 billion in deficit spending without any concern for being seen as hypocritical.

For a bit of perspective, $398 billion is a mere drop in the bucket when compared to the $1 trillion forecasted by the Congressional Budget Office to be added to the deficit spending for every year for the next decade. Of course, the President added a few caveats to his “pay-go” requirement. He conveniently provided an exception for his health care reform spending which has been forecasted to cost the taxpayers at least another $1 trillion in deficit spending. To make matters worse, Obama warns that now is the only time to pass health care reform. He is trying to gin up fear to provide pressure on Congress to pass yet another disastrous spending measure. At this point with nearly $12 trillion in projected deficit spending over the next 10 years, why should we care about spending an additional $1 trillion of money we don’t have?
I believe that the rush to pass the President’s socialist dream is because the administration knows what 2010 will hold for the party in power. They realize that sooner or later the American people will wake up to how disastrous the policies of throwing taxpayer money around to seize control of more of the private sector really are. They are petrified of trying to pass this health care boondoggle during an election year. Recent polls have shown that while approvals of Obama personally remain in the 60% range, approval of his individual policies is dismally low. I fully expect the White House and their loyal sycophants in Congress will try to ramrod health care reform through with very little chance for the voting public to actually read and understand what is in the bill. Early in President Clinton’s first term, health care reform was one of the primary goals on their agenda. Their reform did have broad support until the voters knew the details of the reform. The voters expressed their opposition to the government power grab and the Democrat controlled Congress quickly folded under the pressure. I believe that the Obama administration will try to force their reform quickly through with very little debate to try to avoid the inevitable voter backlash. Of course, as much as Clinton was loved by the left, he never enjoyed the near religious following that Obama does.

Who Is Watching How Our Money Is Spent?

Back in February, after President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, we were told no to worry about massive fraud and waste because they government was going to closely monitor where the money was going. Vice President Joe Biden even went out and threatened the local and state government officials that if they spent the stimulus money unwisely, he would personally go out and name names of the wasteful spenders. We were assured that the government would set up a website so that we could check for ourselves where the money was going. Shockingly, the truth is that the government has no clue as to where the money is going and the elected representatives who signed the check don’t seem to care.

This week the House subcommittee tasked with oversight of the massive amounts of money hemorrhaging from the Treasury Department, held a hearing to get an update on the progress of the website and other tracking methods. The chairman of the Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board, Earl Devaney, told the panel that the website is not ready and probably will not be ready until maybe next year. One would think that this news would raise some eyebrows of the Congressman on the panel, but unfortunately the most of the members decide dthat it was not important to even show up for the hearing. Of the 10 members only 3 showed up in the beginning, with 1 other member showing up late. I suppose that this should not be surprising, especially when you consider that no one in either chamber of Congress actually read the “stimulus” bill before voting on it.

At least we can count on the President to follow through on his promise of going through the federal budget line by line to find areas to cut the spending. This week the President did come out and announce his proposed budget cuts from his $3.55 trillion budget. He plans to make more than 100 cuts in his budget that will save the taxpayers $17 billion. To put it in perspective, if the federal budget were just $355, the President’s cuts would equate to $0.17. How excited would you be if you were buying a new TV and the salesman told you that he could save you 17 cents? Obama’s proposed budget cuts out of his budget amount to less than .5% of his total budget proposal. Do you feel that the government is effectively watching out for your hard earned money?

With a Federal budget deficit forecasted to be more than $9 trillion by the Congressional Budget Office over the next decade when can we expect the President’s promise of fiscal responsibility to be fulfilled? I suppose we could just hope that Congress and the President will change the drunken sailor spending habits. Then again, didn’t thousands of people show up in cities across the country to protest the ludicrous spending and overbearing taxation? Maybe elected officials will take notice of the groundswell of discontent over the tax and spend policies of the current administration. I believe members of both parties need to wake up and see the disastrous future they are preparing for our children. Otherwise they will all find themselves out of work in 2010.

President Obama, The $4 Trillion Man

Earlier this week, President Obama addressed both chambers of Congress to discuss the economy and his plans for the coming years of his administration. During his speech and throughout his campaign, the President promised to end the era of earmarks and deficit spending. He went as far to promise to go line by line through any spending measure and publicize all earmark spending and which congressman had requested it. Just one month into his administration, we have seen massive pork barrel spending and non-stop “the sky is falling” rhetoric.

The ink from President Obama’s pen had not had time to dry on the $800 billion “stimulus” bill, before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through another $400 billion spending bill. The newest spending bill from Congress contains more than 8000 earmarks. This is on top of the countless earmarks in the “stimulus” bill. The new administration and Congress have signed on to spend more than $1.2 trillion in the first 30 days since the Inauguration. To put that into perspective, that is more than half of the federal budget for 2004, or almost half of what the federal government received in tax revenue for all of 2008. We are more than $1.2 trillion more in debt and we are not even into March yet. Of course, Obama’s breathless supporters in the media would tell us to wait until his budget comes out to see where he has made the cuts to pay for the massive deficit spending, but his budget calls for a more than $1 trillion increase in spending over this years’ budget.

The President has released his budget proposal and it totals over $4 trillion, with about $1.75 trillion in projected deficit spending. This is the largest increase in federal spending in our history. In 2008 the federal budget was a paltry, by comparison, $2.978 trillion with total revenue received at $2.523 trillion. That budget had about $450 billion in deficit spending, but to jump to $1.75 trillion in deficit spending and then claim that you are going to control spending is laughable.

The $4,000,000,000,000.00 budget includes tax increases for those making more than $250,000. My friends in the class envy camp applaud this notion of taxing the rich, but they fail to see that a majority of small businesses will now see tax increases. Allow me to ask one simple question. How will your life improve if some nameless “rich” person is taxed more? The Bill Gates and George Soros’ of the world will not pay any more in taxes; they will simply shift their money around to avoid the taxes. The small business owners are the ones that will bear the brunt of the tax increase. After this plan fails to raise the revenue that the “experts” in Washington project, they will be forced to either raise taxes on the rest of us, after all it is the patriotic thing to do, or hopefully they will see the error of their ways and cut taxes across the board. This budget is equivalent to $11,833 for every American.

President Obama was elected on a platform of hope and change; the first indicators of his administration definition of that campaign slogan are beginning to become clear. They are desperately hoping that the voting public will not notice that the change is the unprecedented spending and power grab in Washington. I believe that the voting public is very aware of what affects their wallets and they have a very long memory when it comes to their own financial well being.