From the diaries by Erick

In a recent post on Cato-at-Liberty, I suggested that advocates of limited government should not attack Obama for the record FY2009 deficit. My argument was based on two points. First, the real problem is government spending, so that is where we should focus on energies. Fixating on deficits can be helpful, to be sure, but it also can unwittingly aid the other side since it enables them to offer a “solution” in the form of higher taxes. My second point was that Obama is largely not responsible for the FY2009 budget, which began on October 1, 2008.

This second point has led to some spirited - and conflicting - responses, with Bruce Bartlett attacking me from the left and Mustango attacking me from the right.

Let’s deal with Mustango’s criticisms. He argues that budgets are passed by Congress, presumably implying that Nancy Pelosi, et al, should be blamed. The Speaker of the House is a complete statist, so I’m a big fan of anybody who points out her flaws, but since President Bush supported all of the wasteful spending adopted in the last year (as well as the first seven years) of his presidency, he also must bear responsibility for the results.

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James Pethokoukis of Reuters is at it again, subversion-via-blog.

So in the little sit down with the President, the Chinese made clear they did not believe a word of the President’s promises about ObamaCare not adding to the deficit.

The Chinese asked uncomfortable questions about the cost of ObamaCare:

Guess what? It turns out the Chinese are kind of curious about how President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans would impact America’s huge fiscal deficit. Government officials are using his Asian trip as an opportunity to ask the White House questions. Detailed questions.

Boilerplate assurances that America won’t default on its debt or inflate the shortfall away are apparently not cutting it. Nor should they, when one owns nearly $2 trillion in assets denominated in the currency of a country about to double its national debt over the next decade.

Turns out that when you lie to everyone, no one believes you. Untrue claims that President Obama makes in the speeches to Joint Sessions of Congress about not adding to the deficit, making mystery cuts to Medicare, or not funding abortion, or not allowing illegal immigrants to gain access to his health care benefit, are actually listened to by other nations.

And the economic implications and the national security implications of a President who no one believes are profound, and none of them are good.

Sounds like the Chinese do not believe that a Democratic Congress and President Obama will do anything about the growing deficit. The only thing the Trillion-dollar President can do is spend more Trillions — first on the stimulus, then another trillion plus on health care. And because the world refuses to buy more of our debt, the Fed has printed (you guessed it) a trillion dollars in the last year to give to banks, with instructions to buy our T-Bills in our debt (rigged) “auctions.” This is how we are paying for our deficit, we are printing money. And our Trillion dollar President keeps spending.

The rational reaction of the Chinese (as opposed to the irrational action of spending a trillion dollars on health care) reminds me of a sign I saw at the 9/12 demonstration:

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Not Right Now: Real Soon Now (via AoSHQ).  Apparently the plan is to wait until after the current wave of spending, then convince the Democratic party to stop spending taxpayer money that does not, in point of fact, quite exist.  Except for funding a new jobs bill, which somehow isn’t expected to ‘count.’

But can he do it, after… oh, let Bryon York get this one:

I asked whether Obama, after presiding over the stimulus, the bailouts, the big Democratic budget, the House cap-and-trade vote, health care reform, and finally, a tripling of the already-high federal deficit, could plausibly position himself as a spending hawk. “Their principle failure is that they have allowed themselves to be defined as government interventioners and huge spenders,” the strategist told me. “If he becomes the great expander of government and the great increaser of spending, he’s going to get destroyed in 2012.”

Actually, the principal failure is that they are government interventionists and huge spenders - and have revealed this blatantly enough that independent voters have noticed. In other words, it’s not ‘If he becomes;’ it’s ‘he has become.’  That’s the primary reason why his economic marks are so poor Right Now - and why waiting for Real Soon Now is contraindicated.

Contraindicated.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

They could have saved themselves, but instead, they followed a tortured inside-the-beltway logic that will be lost on the likely voter — I voted for it, to improve it. Uh-huh.

Did members cut spending? End funding of abortion? Enforce the prohibition against illegal immigrants getting the new health care benefit? Cut the $759 billion in new taxes? Curtail the gun health care database? Stop the Medicare cuts? No, oh. I see.

Sounds a whole lot like that famous line, “I voted for it, right before I voted against it.”

Blue Dogs and other Democratic Members of Congress are deluding themselves if they think they can state publicly they voted yes, to improve it. Or that a conference with the White House, the Senate and the House will produce a bill closer to the U.S. Senate’s version.

Instead, they are looking hard for excuses to do the wrong thing.

And if they are looking to end the unending political pain of the Speaker’s health care politics — then the way to end it is to end the bill, and vote no.

Otherwise, they will have to defend their vote in their election, and vote again on the Conference Report — if the bill makes it through the Senate, a very dubious proposition.

Instead, they will be walking the plank, the bill then dies in the Senate — and many of their number will then die in November, 2010.

While the nation is going through the worst recession in modern history, our dollar is deflating because of government debt and we are electronically printing a trillion dollars; unemployment is at 10.2%, let’s tax the American people $752 billion (three quarters of a trillion dollars) and create a new entitlement and spend $1.8 trillion on something less than one in five Americans think is their top concern: health care. Three-quarters of likely voters believe the plan will force employers to give up providing insurance, shredding the “if you like it you can keep it promise.”

All while the American public overwhelmingly oppose the plan, and for triple political pain points, we can have the biggest votes on abortion, immigration, taxes, guns, the public option, Medicare cuts, massive spending and government control all rolled up in one vote, days after special elections that saw Independent voters run like scaled cats, screaming from the Democrats.

And at the same time as the President’s approval rating among likely voters glides ever downward..

Genius, isn’t it? And rational too.

The DailyKos is reporting that out of the 83 signatories to the we will vote no if there is no public option pledge, only 46 remain standing firm. The rest of the progressives have caved. For these 46 liberal Members, a robust public plan means a Medicare plus 5 percent reimbursement rate for providers. However, the Blue Dogs are pushing a rival “negotiated provider reimbursement rate” which the progressives say effectively kills the public option.

Progressives are being squeezed by two fronts, one is their dropping numbers of Members who will stand firm on the public plan or they will vote no pledge, and two, on the negotiated Medicare reimbursement rates which they believe will gut the public option. So, 46 Democrats signed a letter to the Speaker demanding no negotiated rates or we vote no because it will kill the public option.

The Progressives are losing the battle, however, according to the DailyKos, because the direction of the bill is clearly moving to negotiated rates.

But 46 liberals are still more than enough to kill the bill with their votes alone. These 46 votes likely does not account for the other Dem NO votes because of any of the following issues: taxes, spending, abortion, immigration or other bill-killing issues. According to pro-life Democrats, there are 40 NO Dem votes against ObamaCare solely on the issue of abortion, for example.

Curiouser and curiouser said Alice as she went down the rabbit hole…

Heritage’s Brian Riedl crunches some of the still-staggering numbers on the Democrats’ spending spree, including the fact that the projected 2009 budget deficit is larger than the Bush budget deficits for FY 2002-2007 (the six years when Bush had a Republican Congress to work with) combined. A worthwhile fact to recall when dealing with liberals who cannot comprehend how one could be more concerned about Obama’s deficits than Bush’s (of course, as always my concern is with spending, not deficits - deficits are just a symptom of overspending - but even then, Reidl’s point that 43 cents of every federal dollar spent at present is deficit spending is pushing into worrisome territory, especially with important sources of funding drying up).

This year, President Obama will spend a peacetime-record 26 percent of GDP….The 22 percent spending increase projected for 2009 represents the largest government expansion since the 1952 height of the Korean War (adjusted for inflation).

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You’ll note that President Obama has all but dropped “health insurance for the 45 million without coverage” from his health overhaul stump speech.

Why? Because recent polling shows Americans don’t care nearly as much about the “universal” availability of health coverage when they have to pay extra to provide it, and, as the Congressional Budget Office noted, the health overhaul plans currently making their way through Congress will provide coverage for just over a third of the uninsured at most.

You’ll note that President Obama’s newfound emphasis on cost reduction as the chief feature of his health overhaul is accompanied at every stop by an attempt to smear and shut up those who point out that the bill he is demanding be passed will increase costs, not decrease them.

Why? Because with recent polls showing that high cost is far and away the number one concern among Americans about health care, and because 60% of Americans believe real health care reform can be accomplished without costing them any more money, Obama needs to be able to say that costs will come down as a result of his legislation — and, as everybody from Blue Dog Democrats to the director of the Congressional Budget Office (who was appointed jointly by Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Robert Byrd) have noted, the bills being considered by Congress and demanded by Obama will cause health care costs to skyrocket and cause the deficit — already a record, thanks to Obama’s demand for one spending bill after another — to continue its unprecedented growth unabated.

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The Department of Defense is moving forces from Okinawa to Guam – all well and good. Except, the recently passed DOD Authorization contains funding for construction firms to pay their workers wages consistent with labor rates in Hawaii – 250% HIGHER than wages in Guam.

This will not only take over $10 billion (over 10 years) needed dollars out of the pockets of wounded service members, but will pad the pockets of Hawaii’s labor unions while hurting small businesses in Guam.

As we vote on funding for critical programs for our Nation’s Veterans and construction of our military instillations, it is important to ensure the timely and adequate delivery of these services.

This provision provides labor unions dollars, that in my opinion, are more crucial and can be better spent on military hospitals as they deliver first-class health care to our wounded soldiers.

House Democrats agreed Friday to raise taxes by about $550 billion to pay
for their sweeping expansion of the nation’s health care system.

The huge tax increase will only pay for about half the cost of the Democrats’ health spending plans, so according to the New York Times, the Democrats will also cut Medicare spending, the government health plan for the elderly, and other health care savings to pay for the rest of the $trillion-plus health care spending spree.

The top federal tax rate is now 35 percent, but Democrats have vowed to raise it to 39.6 percent next year. The Washington Post quotes Robert Carroll, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Tax Foundation, as saying that combined with other federal tax adjustments, the Democrats’ new health care spending tax increase could leave some taxpayers facing top federal rates of at least 45 percent.

The Democrats’ new health care spending tax increase agreement enables House Democrat leaders to unveil health legislation Monday and bring it to a vote before the Congress takes an August vacation.

Reminiscent of the no-bid, cost-plus contracts awarded in the Bush administration to defense contractors, ABC News reported last night the Obama Administration awarded a five-year $18 million contract to Smartronix, a Maryland-based IT firm with connections to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, for the redesign of Recovery.gov.

Launched in February to track the expenditures of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Recovery.gov was to be the pinnacle of web-enabled transparency, according to President Barack Obama.

“The site is the tip of the iceberg for the effort that will go into taking spending tracking and accountability to the next level,” one administration official said of their intended level of transparency.

But now, it seems, the administration has failed to deliver on two pledges central to the Obama campaign’s rhetoric: fiscal responsibility and unrivaled transparency.

An acerbic Ed Morrissey asks, “Since when does it cost $18 million for a website, even one with a database requiring updates on a quarterly basis?”

Not often.

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Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, Republican of Irvine, is running for Senate in the hopes of challenging and defeating Senator Barbara Boxer (Dunce-California) in November 2010. He’s gotten off to an early start, but he needs it, because he’s definitely an underdog. California has not elected a Republican Senator since Pete Wilson in 1986, nor have we elected a pro-life politician to a statewide office since Attorney General Dan Lungren won in 1994, and before that the re-election of Governor George Deukmejian in 1986. It’s been a long time.

Chuck DeVore has a plan, though. During a conference call today with online activists and ‘bloggers,’ which your reporter was able to listen in on, he said that he’s consciously attempting to mimic the successful strategies followed by Barack Obama in his underdog victory over Hillary Clinton last year. He intends to use the Internet and the grass roots to get more done than Republicans in his position have in the past.

He’s ready on the issues, too, and not just the tools of politics.

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The results of new independent polls from credible opinion research houses indicate that Americans, concerned about Obama’s radical spending and abortion policies, appear to be moving to the right. The usual obligatory disclaimers: It’s only four polls. We need to see more data before we can identify any trends, if they do indeed exist. But there is reason for conservatives and right-leaning independents to find encouragement here.

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The California Constitution requires that our state government’s budget be balanced every year. Having a RiNO* in the Governor’s chair and Democrats controlling the entire legislature make that a fantasy though. They spend, and spend, and when tax revenues fall, they cry about Republican failures to approve tax increases.

Thanks to the Governor and a few other turncoats, they got a sales tax increase this year, but even that’s not enough to balance the budget. So now the Democrats turn to the voters to approve of a massive shell game that will let them tax and spend without consequence. I ask Red State readers to join me in opposing the entire slate, forcing us to live within our means, and giving our Republicans in Sacramento support in fighting runaway spending.

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There President Obama goes yet again — saying one thing while doing the opposite.

After prodding by the White House, Congressional Democrats near a budget deal so Obama can have his spend too much, tax too much, borrow too much budget in place within his first 100 days.

President Obama’s budget includes a $1.75 trillion deficit so he can spend nearly $4 trillion in fiscal year 2010. The Congressional Budget Office predicts will Obama’s budget result in deficits of $9.3 trillion over ten years — $2.3 trillion more than the deficit estimated by the White House. And then, in this week’s Obama propaganda video, he has the audacity to call for fiscal discipline. Is he serious?

“We cannot sustain deficits that mortgage our children’s future, nor tolerate wasteful inefficiency.”

Too bad Obama doesn’t practice what he preaches.

[W]hat I’ve proposed, you’ll hear Sen. McCain say, well, he’s proposing a whole bunch of new spending, but actually I’m cutting more than I’m spending so that it will be a net spending cut.

-Barack Obama, Second Presidential Debate, October 7, 2008.

OBAMA: …[W]hat I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut. I haven’t made a promise about…

SCHIEFFER: But you’re going to have to cut some of these programs, certainly.

OBAMA: Absolutely. So let me get to that. What I want to emphasize, though, is that I have been a strong proponent of pay-as- you-go. Every dollar that I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it matches.

-Barack Obama, Third Presidential Debate, October 15, 2008.

If ever a public policy proposal deserved universal ridicule, it has to be President Obama’s effort to convince the public that [cue Dr. Evil voice] 100 million dollars in spending cuts are a significant dent in federal spending. Since Obama looked the nation in the eye and made that read-my-lips promise of a net spending cut in those two debates, we have sat and watched as he signed into law a colossal $787 billion ’stimulus’ bill, proposed a $634 billion fund to begin offsetting the projected trillion-dollar cost of his health care plans, and unveiled a $3.6 trillion budget that’s projected to consume 26% of GDP, the biggest share for federal spending since World War II (it hasn’t been above 21% since the last budget before the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994).

Over at the New Ledger, our RS colleague Francis Cianfrocca notes the puny relative size of this proposal:

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On April 2nd, Speaker Nancy Pelosi succeeded in passing her federal budget that outlines more than 3.5 trillion dollars in spending for fiscal year 2010. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected a 1.8 trillion dollar deficit for the current fiscal year (FY2009), and that projection does not include the stimulus bill that will cost Americans more than one trillion dollars, which was signed into law by the President on February 1st. As of April 7, 2009, the U.S. national debt stands at more than eleven trillion dollars (you can view the latest numbers here).


The sheer magnitude of Speaker Pelosi’s spending spree is mind boggling. Most of us do not use the number 1,000,000,000,000 in our daily lives, so it is difficult to attach tangible value to the figure. However, as Congress and the Administration continues spending your tax dollars trillions of dollars at a time, it is worthwhile to have a discussion about what these numbers really mean.

One of the simplest ways to get an idea of one trillion dollars is to consider the amount in terms of the passage of time. One million seconds is equal to roughly eleven days and twelve hours, and one billion seconds is thirty-two years. One trillion seconds equals thirty-two thousand years.

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MoveOn once asked (link via Save the GOP) who would pay for the President’s deficit spending. Let’s ask again:

Try this if the embed fails.

Update: Jake Tapper notes that it was one year ago this week that then-Sen. Obama (D-IL) “swooped in from the campaign trail to — along with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. — vote for an amendment to impose a one-year moratorium on earmarks for fiscal year 2009.” What a difference a year and a change in power makes, eh?

I will “eliminate” earmarks that have “no legitimate public purpose” from bills that cross my desk! declared President Obama today at a White House press availability held to announce his intent to sign an $410,000,000,000.00 omnibus spending bill containing 9,000 earmarks with no legitimate public purpose.

Congressional earmarks should be posted on lawmakers’ websites “so the public and the press can examine them and judge their merit for themselves,” Obama said, adding that each earmark request should “be open to scrutiny at public hearings, where members will have to justify their expense to the taxpayer.”

Pork-filled bills like this “will not happen when the president has the full legislative and appropriations process in place,” said OMB head Peter Orszag on CNN. (When the president has the full legislative apparatus in place? Last I checked, that was a bit of a different branch of government than the one Mr. Obama “leads”….)

“I don’t think the White House has the ability to tell us what to do,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), who has apparently been living in a cave since November 4, 2008, as he appears to have missed the fact that Hope and Change have come to Washington, and that opposing the President’s will on any count means being anti-American and hoping your country fails (because as we all know, now that it’s a Democrat in the White House, “if the president fails, the country fails“).

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According to Forbes Magazine, the Obama administration is overestimating the number of homeowners who will be helped by their mortgage plan. Instead of helping 9 million homeowners as Obama claims, the greatest number that could be helped is closer to 5 million:

President Barack Obama plans to spend $275.0 billion to rework or modify up to 9.0 million troubled American mortgages, but his program isn’t likely to help anywhere near that many people.

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