Obama: The Factor Of Four

Obama has publicly excoriated George W. Bush for running up a $455 billion deficit. Apparently, we missed the nuance there. It wasn’t high enough to suit Obama.

So he’s going to quadruple it.

Bailouts for financial firms and billions in tax revenue lost because of the recession drove the deficit to a record $1.3 trillion in July, according to the independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Tax receipts that have fallen due to the poor economy and increased spending to save car companies, banks and mortgage firms were major contributors to the federal deficit, according to CBO, which provides official budget numbers for Congress. The federal deficit grew by another $181 billion in July.

Falling tax receipts and increased spending on bailouts for auto companies and the financial sector and for the economic stimulus package added to the deficit, according to CBO, which provides official budget numbers for Congress.

CBO now projects a $1.8 trillion deficit by the end of the fiscal year in September. Almost exactly four times the maximum Bush deficit. I’m certainly not going to defend Bush’s spending – or Democrat-controlled Congressional excess in the past three years - but I don’t see how multiplying the deficit by a factor of four will get us out of an economic hole.

Apparently, all those economics courses and budgeting basics drilled into me over the years missed that little bit of wisdom. Good thing. My family likes having a roof over its head.

This is disastrous spending, folks. We are borrowed to the hilt and they want to spend more. If I ran my house this way, I’d be homeless.

Is this the change you were hoping for? To go from broke to broke and utterly ruined?

CBO Cites Facts, Democrats Whine

The Congressional Budget Office works for – wait for it – Congress. What a surprise, right? Well, when the CBO cites authoritative studies to back up their analyses, Congress and the current Obama spokesperson insist that the CBO just isn’t giving Congress enough credit.

In yet more disappointing news for Democrats pushing for health care reform, Douglas W. Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, offered a skeptical view Friday of the cost savings that could result from preventive care — an area that President Obama and congressional Democrats repeatedly had emphasized as a way health care reform would be less expensive in the long term.

Obviously successful preventive care can make Americans healthier and save lives. But, Elmendorf wrote, it may not save money as Democrats had been arguing.

“Although different types of preventive care have different effects on spending, the evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall,” Elmendorf wrote. “That result may seem counterintuitive.

….

In their continuing struggles with CBO, Democrats from President Obama on down have expressed frustration that Elmendorf doesn’t give Democrats’ health care reform proposals sufficient credit for cost cutting through preventive care.

“One of the things that’s disappointing about CBO — and frustrating — is all the work … done on prevention” that the CBO doesn’t factor in, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., co-author of the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee legislation, recently griped.

The difference: CBO cites studies that Jake Tapper links to that prove that the CBO view is correct. The Democrats and Obama cite – well – nothing whatsoever. They just insist that they are right and the CBO is wrong. Because, apparently, the CBO doesn’t subscribe to “Then a miracle happens” theory.

Congress – including members quoted in the article – and Obama himself swore themselves blue in the face that the super-duper, ultra-wonderful “stimulus” would create more jobs than you could shake a cliché at AND all but guarantee a pony for everyone.

How’s that working out?

Please go read the whole thing – including the studies Tapper links to. 

I’d submit that the decision here goes to the CBO, not to the whining members of Congress and especially not to the Obama Pollyanna, who is just absolutely sure they are right. Really they are. They just have to be. As has been the case at every turn, the health care “reform” will actually cost more. The only way they curve is being bent is straight up, asymptotic to the axis (sorry, math degree got the better of me).

(Incidentally, Pollyanna is Linda Douglass – an ex-journalist. Elmendorf has a few more credentials in the world of financial facts.)

Harry Hunkers In His Bunker

Wow. Harry Reid: Coward. He’s refusing to actually meet with his constituents and will only talk to them – or rather lecture them – over the phone.

A day after holding up a square of Astroturf to denounce the orchestrated attacks on Democratic town hall meetings on health care, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office said he would be talking with his Nevada constituents this month over the phone lines.

Reid’s office is scheduling a telephone town hall meeting for August, opting to avoid the shouting matches and microphone speeches that have erupted at events across the country. The senator expects to reach thousands of Nevadans, including those in the state’s rural expanse.

“It’s a forum that obviously lets us reach more people, but also provides a more respectful environment that allows all sides to be heard,” said Reid spokesman Jon Summers.

Cluck, cluck, cluck, Harry.  Maybe it’s not just cowardice, of course. It could be that since it’s August and all, good old Harry just doesn’t want to smell the peons while he lectures them.

Hey, Nevadans, now you know with what high regard you are held by Harry. 

(This is, frankly, one of the more stupid things Harry has done. And that is saying a lot.)

Carter On Steroids

E. Thomas McClanahan, writing in The Kansas City Star:

What we’re seeing in Washington these days is beginning to look like Jimmy Carter II.

Carter, like Barack Obama, started out with the idea of stimulating the economy.

His plan was to give every taxpayer $50, then throw in a few billion for tax cuts and public works programs. Simple, right? Wrong: In Washington, this soon became very complicated. Within a month, the package grew from $20 billion to more than $31 billion – a significant amount in the 1970s.

Special-interest groups piled on. Unions, minorities, the sugar lobby, bankers, shoe manufacturers – all clamored for a piece of the pie, all wanted to know: “Where’s mine?”

In April of his first year in office, Carter finally threw up his hands and scrapped the whole idea. He had dithered for four months. He had nothing to show for the effort. By then he was fatally diminished, his authority substantially eroded.

With the Obama administration, a similar unraveling is well under way and gathering momentum. Voters are increasingly restive. The country is souring on Obama’s gargantuan policy ambitions. The sense is growing that he has grossly overplayed his hand.

I think it is still a bit soon to pronounce Obama’s hard-left agenda dead just yet. Pressure from voters on their elected officials needs to continue. (Actually, the pressure needs to increase still more.) Now is not the time to back off. The only way to stop this leftward march is to convince the Democrats that they face a devastating 2010 election if they continue on their course.

If the pressure keeps up, I fully expect Obama to look more and more like Carter – hopefully with the same results in 2012. But we have to keep after his horrible policies. This is no time to slacken the effort.

Ah, The Good Old Days

Like before last November. ‘Way back then, dissent was “patriotic”. Now, we are assured by the same Democrats and the media (redundant) that dissent is outright Nazism. Just ask Nancy Pelosi:

The truth is that for my adult lifetime, “protest” has been a kind of Kabuki engaged in by organized groups on the Left with help from the press — as in the recent bus tour of AIG executives that was organized and paid for by an ACORN affiliate and in which the protesters were heavily outnumbered by the media, who nonetheless generally treated it as an “authentic” expression of populist discontent.

Things like that tour led President Obama to warn bankers that he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks, one of a number of thuggish statements he’s made along these lines.

Funny how fast the worm — or maybe it’s the pitchfork — has turned. Now that we’re seeing genuine expressions of populist discontent, not put together by establishment packagers on behalf of an Officially Sanctioned Aggrieved Group, we’re suddenly hearing complaints of “mob rule” and demands for civility.

Civility is fine, but those who demand it should show it. The Obama administration — and its corps of willing supporters in the press and the punditry — has set the tone, and they are now in a poor position to complain.

Whether they like it or not — and the evidence increasingly tends toward “not” — President Obama and his handlers need to accept that this is a free country, one where expressions of popular discontent take place outside the electoral process, and always have. (Remember
Martin Luther King?)

The Obama administration has become increasingly thuggish it its behavior, issuing threats and dire warnings. Obama’s hirelings have been openly coordinating the increasingly vicious attacks on dissent. They are trying to silence debate or dissent, not the opposite.

This is loathsome behavior by the administration and their congressional and media allies.  It also appears to be backfiring in a very big way as people come to realize exactly what Obama and his thugs are trying to do. Good. 

Push back people. And bring your video cameras for when the hired goons show up.