California Conservative

President Obama has noticed that people aren’t giving him high marks for his handling of the economy or on fiscal restraint. That’s the biggest reason why he’s attempting to sound like he’s paying atttention. His biggest problem in convincing people is that articles like this keep popping up:

President Barack Obama on Tuesday proposed budget rules that would allow Congress to borrow tens of billions of dollars and put the nation deeper in debt to jump-start the administration’s emerging health care overhaul. The “pay-as-you-go” budget formula plan is significantly weaker than a proposal Obama issued with little fanfare last month.

It would carve out about $2.5 trillion worth of exemptions for Obama’s priorities over the next decade. His health care reform plan also would get a green light to run big deficits in its early years. But over a decade, Congress would have to come up with money to cover those early year deficits.

Obama’s latest proposal for addressing deficits urges Congress to pass a law requiring lawmakers to pay for new spending programs and tax cuts without further adding to exploding deficits projected to total about $10 trillion over the next decade.

In other words, President Obama’s version of Paygo doesn’t have teeth. It’s insulting that President Obama is talking like he’ll get serious about the deficit now that his policies have added almost $1,200,000,000,000 to this year’s deficit. ($1,197,000,000,000 to be precise but who’s counting, right?) What’s worse is that Paygo won’t apply to President Obama’s plans to destroy American health care. (Most people call it health care reform but that’s a joke.)

President Obama’s policies aren’t just bankrupting America. They’re destroying future economic growth. That isn’t just my opinion. That’s what the CBO said:

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

Here’s the two important questions that President Obama hasn’t answered:

Why institute policies that (a) hurt economic growth for the next decade and (b) cause interest rates and inflation to spike sharply? Are you anti-prosperity.

Past presidents have charted a course prosperity. Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan advocated different policies but both produced economies that helped Americans achieve prosperity. In his inaugural address, President Obama advocated something different:

But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions, that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

I thought then that remaking was an odd choice of words. I thought it odd because past presidents would’ve used the opportunity to say it’s time to rebuild America. It would’ve been appropriate to say it’s time to rebuild America’s economy or America’s infrastructure. Instead, President Obama stated quite clearly that he wanted to remake America, presumably in his own narcisstic, ill-tempered private image.

Redstate’s Brian Faughnan nails Obama’s PayGo plan in this post:

You would be right to ask the question. But beyond that, you ought to note that
PayGo doesn’t even apply to one major category of spending: discretionary
spending. It applies only to direct spending (ie, entitlements such as Social
Security and Medicare). And Obama has also specifically asked for 4 exceptions
to the rule. As a result, the new ‘PayGo’ has more holes in it than swiss
cheese:

The administration will submit a proposal to Congress to codify the
rule into law, and Mr. Obama today called for a quick passage in the House and the Senate. The PAYGO rules will apply to new tax cuts and mandatory spending, with four major exemptions, any renewal of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, the continued efforts to “patch” the Alternative Minimum Tax, any effort to address physician’s payments in Medicare, and modifying the estate tax.
In addition, discretionary spending, roughly 40% of the federal budget, is not covered by PAYGO.

“This is like quitting drinking, but making an exception for beer and hard liquor,” said Maya MacGuineas, President of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). “Exempting these measures from PAYGO would increase the ten-year deficit by over $2.5 trillion dollars. That’s not fiscal responsibility…”

There’s nothing in this president’s actions that suggest that he’s the least bit interested in fiscal discipline. Quite the contrary, there’s oodles of proof that he’s utterly disinterested in exercising fiscal restraint.

Let’s call this for what it is: a cheap political stunt aimed at restoring his sagging poll ratings on the economy. This video is a great exchange between Greta Van Susteren and Stephen Moore on President Obama’s insulting the American people:

If President Obama continues insulting Americans’ intelligence like he did in his speech, and if people like Greta Van Susteren and Stephen Moore keep busting him for his intellectual dishonesty, it won’t take long for the people to turn on him and congressional Democrats. The American people are losing their jobs, their homes and their retirement accounts. They hired President Obama to fix this economy. Thus far, he’s done nothing to this economy except to drive it deeper into the ground.

Instead of there ‘only’ being a crisis in the financial sector, we’re now facing an unprecedented debt level, most of which is of President Obama’s and Speaker Pelosi’s making. High inflation and interest rates are imminent. Unemployment isn’t levelling off, either. Spending is out of control.

What, pray tell, has this administration done right?

I wrote here that President Obama’s ineptitude was showing, both economically and internationally. He’s done little right to change that image.

BOTTOM LINE: Obama’s notion of PayGo is much like everything else about him: an illusion totally divorced from reality.

Technorati Tags: Economy, Deficits, PayGo, President Obama, Exemptions, Health Care Reform, CBO, Inflation, Unemployment, Liberalism

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 3:08 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Economy, Liberals, Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.