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Mark Steyn says to the president, it’s the spending, Stupid.
National Review’s Jim Geraghty sums up Obama’s America thus: “Unsustainable is the new normal.” Indeed. The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.” So let’s make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in “Spaceballs” (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”
Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001-08, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.
But, if they’re “unsustainable,” what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP growth? Total societal collapse? Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike? …
…Speaking of roads, I see that, according to USA Today, when the economic downturn began the U.S. Department of Transportation had just one employee making over $170,000. A year and a half later, it has 1,690. …
Peter Schiff explains how government is strangling the American economy.
…Regulation acts like a tax on job creation. By subjecting employers to all sorts of extra expenses when they hire people, regulations increase the cost of employment far beyond the wages employers actually pay their workers. In fact, some regulations are specifically tied to the number of workers employed. This provides some employers with a strong incentive to stay small and not hire. …
…Subsidies produce the opposite effect of regulation, but sometimes the results can be just as harmful. Government subsidies divert resources towards politically favored activities, resulting in more jobs in areas such as health care and education, but fewer jobs in other sectors such as manufacturing. The net effect of this transfer is to diminish the productive capacity and efficiency of the economy, which lowers real economic growth and diminishes employment opportunities.
Although not as visible as regulations and subsidies, government spending also plays a large role in job destruction. The more money government spends, the more resources it drains from the private sector. The fiscal 2011 budget proposed by President Obama contains $3.8 trillion in federal spending. Think of government as a cancer feeding off the private sector. The larger it grows, the more jobs it kills. …
Jennifer Rubin knows why the administration can’t figure out how to get jobs created.
… Perhaps if the president or anyone in his administration had ever run a business or been responsible for a payroll, there would be more understanding about the negative impact Obama’s policies (including his mandate- and fine-filled health-care bill) have on those we must rely on to fuel the economic recovery. Unfortunately, this administration is long on academic types and government bureaucrats and short on entrepreneurs. We could use a few about now.
David Goldman (aka Spengler) comments on last Friday’s jobless numbers.
… I don’t think that government statisticians are faking the data; they simply are running the old statistical routines out of the canned econometrics program to generate seasonal adjustment factors which are–to put it mildly–a lot less meaningful in the present environment than in a normal economy.
The Liberal death march continues. Charles Krauthammer explains why.
…A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health-care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a “jobs bill.”
This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?
Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly. …
In the Detroit News, Nolan Finley discusses the condescension and the irresponsibility that we are seeing from the president.
There’s always been a disconnect between what Barack Obama says and what he does, but for the last few weeks, the president’s rhetoric has been wholly detached from reality. …
…After unveiling his budget earlier this week, Obama crisscrossed the country, lecturing Americans on the virtues of frugality. “We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences,” the president said, adding that the government has to make hard choices and set priorities.
That’s a good message. Except that this is entirely Obama’s budget. He’s the one who failed to set priorities, who didn’t make hard choices. The nearly $1.3 trillion deficit built into this budget is historic in its fiscal recklessness, and it belongs to him. …
In the WaPo, Charles Lane comments on a request from Senator Blanche Lincoln to Obama, asking for a more centrist approach. The president refused on the grounds that anything other than Obama policies are Bush policies.
…The first was the ease with which he cast Lincoln’s plea for a bit more centrism as a call for a return to Bushism — the “exact same proposals that were in place for the last eight years.” That’s not what she was advocating; it’s not what any Democrat who’s questioning his approach is advocating. But the president set up this strawman, and he pummeled it, rather than engaging Lincoln’s valid concerns.
The second striking thing was how easily he appeared to write off Lincoln politically. Conceding nothing, he implied that her defeat was not only a foregone conclusion, but also an acceptable price to pay for staying the course on policy. …
…Still, give the president credit: No one can accuse him of bending his principles to politics. Of course, if there’s a price to be paid for that this year, he won’t be the one paying it. Blanche Lincoln, among others, will get to do that.
Jennifer Rubin adds excellent comments to Charles Lane’s piece.
Charles Lane catches Obama writing Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s political obituary. During the meeting Senate Democrats had with Obama, the imperiled Red State senator practically pleaded with the president to turn to the Center. (”Are we willing as Democrats to push back on our own party?”) Her request was summarily denied. Any accommodation to “centrism” is a return to Bush policies, said Obama. Lane is stunned on two grounds by Obama’s stridency…
Well, at least the Red State senators and Blue Dog Democrats know where they stand. They are about to be pushed off that “precipice” Obama keeps talking about. But, as Lane notes, the dogmatic fidelity to leftism requires Obama to ignore some fairly convincing political evidence that this is the way to ruin for the Democratic party — and for Obama. (”If Virginia and New Jersey didn’t prove that, Massachusetts did. And November could prove it again.”)
This is what happens when arrogance and political extremism meet political tone-deafness. The Obami haven’t learned anything from Massachusetts; they simply are more candid that the Blanche Lincolns have no place in their party. But in doing so, they’re also writing off the majority of the electorate, which doesn’t share their fascination with big government and doesn’t appreciate their disdain for the ability of ordinary citizens to make decisions on their own. When Obama tells Lincoln to get lost, he’s also telling the voters of Arkansas (and a bunch of other states) that his agenda and his party’s political goals aren’t for them. Does he suppose that he can govern and win re-election by dismissing all centrists in this fashion? That’s a recipe for becoming a fringe minority party, not a broad governing majority. I suspect Lane is right: it will take a November 2010 election to ram that message home.
Ed Morrissey has some interesting thoughts on Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goldman’s comments about Obama. You know, like the one where the mayor said, “I gotta tell you this, everybody says I shouldn’t say it, but I gotta tell you the way it is. This president is a real slow learner.”
…I find myself in the odd position of defending Obama on this score. His speech contained very clear conditionals (emphases mine):
When times are tough, you — you tighten your belts. You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.
Well … yeah. Maybe Obama would have been better advised to keep it generic by saying “in the casinos” rather than “on Vegas”, but otherwise, this is only remarkable for its banality. You’d hear the same kind of advice from your parents, and probably would have rolled your eyes at its obvious nature. …
…But the man who will pay most will be Harry Reid, who has spent the past year carrying Obama’s water on Capitol Hill. He can’t win re-election without a huge turnout in Sin City and a big spread. If Obama becomes unpopular in Las Vegas, Reid’s re-election will become an impossibility rather than the improbability it is at the moment. …
John Stossel calls him Spiro T. Obama.
This week the President again showed how thin-skinned he is about criticism in the media. Maybe he’s so sensitive to criticism because he’s gotten so little of it. …
In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner says that Obama can stop apologizing for America, and start apologizing for himself. Gardiner recommends 10 items. Here are three:
4. Apology to the victims of Communism
Barack Obama made Berlin a central stage of his presidential election campaign when he addressed an adoring crowd of hundreds of thousands of Germans in July 2008. However in November 2009, President Obama could not be bothered to fly to Berlin to attend the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when even the Russian president showed up. Hillary Clinton stood in for the commander-in-chief and delivered an underwhelming speech that was more about Obama than American leadership in the Cold War. The White House decision to snub the Berlin ceremony was an insult to the memory of the tens of millions who perished at the hands of Communism in Europe. It demonstrated a callous disregard for human suffering and a refusal to acknowledge the huge role played by Ronald Reagan and the American people in bringing down the Iron Curtain. It also displayed what can only de described as an arrogant disdain for the transatlantic alliance.
5. Apology to the victims of the Sudan genocide
The Obama administration’s decision to engage with the brutal regime in Khartoum led by Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was both shocking and morally sickening. Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, retired Air Force Major General J. Scott Gration summed up the new US strategy when he ludicrously declared: “We’ve got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries — they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.” This sent an appalling signal to would be genocidal regimes across the world that even they can be rehabilitated after murdering hundreds of thousands of people. Although it has received relatively little attention, the White House’s offer to lift sanctions against Sudan in exchange for “concrete steps in a new direction”, was one of the worst decisions made by Barack Obama since he took office.
6. Apology to the people of Honduras
It is still difficult to fathom the reasoning behind the White House’s incredible decision to side with Marxist despot Manuel Zelaya after he was removed by the Honduran Congress with the backing of the country’s Supreme Court. The Obama administration immediately condemned the fully constitutional actions of pro-American legislators who acted against a power-hungry figure determined to stay in power beyond his fixed term of office. Bizarrely, the White House aligned itself with the likes of America-hating tyrants like Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega against pro-democracy forces who love the United States.