Obama, Pelosi redefine big spending - OCRegister
Friday, 03 April 2009 21:51
From 2000-06, Republicans had near-complete control of the levers of government in Washington, D.C. I am the first to admit that we spent too much money and ran up deficits that were too high. My party certainly did not act like the fiscal conservatives we profess to be.
But if Republicans were the fiscal equivalent of "two drink-a-day" spenders, President Barack Obama and the Nancy Pelosi-led Congress are throwing-up, passing-out, flat-out wasted on spending and deficits. The Obama budget is so extreme that it did not receive a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate, and a number of moderate Democrats in both Houses also opposed it.
The standard line is that this Democratic budget spends too much, taxes too much, and borrows too much. This is an understatement at how bad it really is. Here are a few facts:
- The budget will double the $11 trillion national debt in 5 1/2 years and triple it after 10 years. That means the government would need to borrow an additional $2-plus trillion per year, every year than it is currently borrowing. It may not be possible to get anyone to lend us that much.
- Obama, the 44th president, will run up a greater deficit than the previous 43 presidents combined.
- The federal government next year will consume $1 of every $4 produced in the entire country. The last time the government spent this percentage of total output was when we were fighting World War II.
- President Obama pledged that he would not raise taxes on families earning less than $250,000 per year. But his first tax increase (on cigarettes) already went into effect April 1. This tax applies to all smokers. In the budget, he proposes to double everyone's electric and heating bills through a "carbon tax" system called "cap and trade." He also limits deductions for individuals earning over $104,000 in addition to big tax increases on people earning over that amount.
- After all of that, this budget does nothing to fix the impending bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare and in fact, makes their problems worse.
This is bad stuff. But what would be the impact of all of this on jobs and the economy?
Well, we too have an instructive example: the state of California.
The strategy of the oppressive government statists is to spend lots of money running up deficits. Then, when the situation escalates out of control, they will argue that their intention wasn't to raise taxes on everyone, but now they have no choice, that is, other than large, sweeping program cuts governmentwide. What they don't tell you is that you could simply "cut" it back to the level it was before they raised it. Of course, obscuring this fact is part of their strategy.
Don't fall for it. In order to balance the Obama/Pelosi budget, they would have to raise every federal tax – payroll taxes, income taxes, corporate taxes, the alternative minimum tax, death taxes, gas taxes, excise taxes – by at least 30 percent on everybody.
The Republican alternative budget proposal is not rocket science. We simply hold spending steady instead of growing it by large margins, and this means lower deficits, less debt and no need to increase taxes.
This is not just a fight between one budget proposal and another. The Obama agenda is much more ambitious than that. It is a clash between two very different futures for America. The Democrats are leading America to be something akin to the more socialist states of Europe, with less freedom, much higher taxes, more of our lives controlled by government bureaucracies, less choice, less opportunity to succeed, and perpetually high unemployment. The Republican alternative leverages the power of private enterprise and the inventiveness of individual Americans to creatively deal with the problems that confront us.
It will take a united effort on the behalf of Americans who love the founding liberties and principles of our great nation in order to stop the Obama/Pelosi government surge. Please join us.
