The White House and the Democratic Congress are preparing to ram Obama’s massive budget blueprint down our throats as early as next week.
What are you going to do about it?
Are you simply going to sit idly by, brace yourself, open wide and swallow hard, like you did with the $787 billion (so-called) stimulus package and the $499 billion omnibus bill that contained some 9,000 pork barrel projects that round out the 2009 budget?
Christina Romer, the Berkeley professor who is chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, set the stage for what is about to happen, telling us that this thing is “too big to wait.”
Haven’t we heard this twice before? Same song, third verse: It ought to get better but it’s getting worse!
What’s the future for a country built entirely on debt? Find out in “Bankruptcy of our Nation”
Bear in mind, in a few short weeks, if all goes according to the Pelosi/Reid plan, Obama will be allowed to run up more debt than all previous presidents from Washington to Bush combined.
All this from a man who promised that he was going to change the way we do business in Washington. If this plan is enacted, change is about all you will have left in your pocket.
The original Obama budget is up on the White House website. An excellent analysis by Brian Riedl is available from the Heritage Foundation.
The Democrats are rewriting that budget blueprint. Yesterday, the White House declared victory, saying the House and Senate budget proposals are “98 percent the same” as President Obama requested. In other words, the changes are, for the most part, inconsequential!
Remember what happened with the first two spending bills that were rushed through at light speed? If all goes according to the Pelosi/Reid plan, the staffs of our representatives in Washington – working as a team around the clock – will not have an opportunity to read the budget in its entirety before a vote is called.
Haven’t we learned anything from these last two debacles? Time to put the brakes on!
Here’s what we do know about that budget blueprint:
- It contains the largest tax increase and represents the largest budget Congress has ever been asked to approve.
- It will raise taxes on all Americans – not just the “rich” – by $1.4 trillion over the next decade.
- Even with these steep tax increases, after the recession is over and our troops have returned from Iraq, if all goes according to the Obama plan, we will have budget deficits of from $500 billion to $700 billion as far as the eye can see.
Obama is trying to mislead us by crowing about the fact that his budget will halve the deficit by 2013. Bear in mind, that’s after it quadruples this year. This means that Obama will leave us with a deficit twice what it was under President Bush.
While the Bush deficits were unacceptable, this is an outrage!
It appears that the president cares less – much less – about ending the recession than he does about callously using the recession to move us from the free market into a socialist utopia. Obama blames our present woes on three things, none of which led to this recession:
- Inadequate education
- Rising health care costs
- Energy dependence
Unfortunately, the policies he is racing to enact do little to solve even these problems.
Competition is the key to keeping cost down and quality up in everything from health care to education. Obama is determined to lock us into a one-size-fits-all plan controlled by the federal government for all but the very rich and politically connected.
Obama’s plan to promote wind and solar power as an alternative for the long term would be laudable if we were not in the middle of an economic crisis. However, his refusal to allow us to tap into our vast oil reserves – on and offshore – in the near term is reckless. It will wreck havoc on our ailing economy and will drive up the cost of everything for years to come. Also, his refusal to promote nuclear power, which is both clean and cost effective, will put us at a tremendous disadvantage as we compete with other industrialized nations.
According to figures from the Heritage Foundation, before the recession, federal spending totaled $24,000 per household. Under President Obama’s plan, federal spending will rise to $32,000 per household over the next 10 years. Obama will be long gone, but we will be saddled with this permanent increase. Just how much can you, your children and your grandchildren bear?
Are you going to remain silent and allow this to happen?
It is time to rise up and say, “Enough!”
