"Spending"

by Steve Scherrer

Few would argue that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has a well earned reputation for partisanship. He was quoted saying, “Obama will challenge Americans to embrace a new era of responsible behavior and reject the culture of anything goes”. He also said that “a crisis should not go to waste”. One month into the new administration we have markets dropping faster than a meteor and a restructuring of the American economy into a European style of socialism. The market reflects not only a no convince vote in his economic plan but shocked disbelief in the manner and lightening speed it was jammed through Congress.

Keynesian economics contends that economic prosperity flows from the hand of government. Both common sense and history has shown that to be utter nonsense. Government creates no wealth. It has the power however unless restrained by a free people to confiscate the wealth and productivity of a society. Margaret Thatcher once said that the trouble with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. All power in Washington is now in the hands of the most anti-capitalist politicians in the history of this Republic. With Democrats holding an overwhelming majority in both Houses of Congress a sympathetic media will have a difficult time making excuses for the sheer recklessness of their actions. The Bush administration cannot be held up as a scapegoat forever. They expanded government far too much to the disliking of true conservatives. The left was right to criticize Bush but now they embrace the expansion of government far beyond the previous administration and tell us that we have to give it a chance. Where’s the logic in that kind of reasoning.

The so called stimulus bill has virtually nothing in it to support small business which is of course the engine of economic growth. The amount of wasteful spending is unprecedented. A trillion dollars is a million million. Numbers like that are hard to fathom. The spending bill amounted to about a billion dollars per page which by the way not a single member of Congress had a chance to read after it came out of the conference committee and came up for a vote. Not a single Republican was involved in the crafting of this monstrosity thus sending down in flames Obama’s promise of bipartisanship and transparency. Obama however behaved as a petulant child when none of the Republican House members voted for his bill. He of course was looking for cover from the Republicans when this massive expansion of government buries our economy. While in Peoria at the Caterpillar plant he promised that his stimulus package would put their workers back on the job. Later Caterpillar’s CEO was asked if that was true and he remarked that more layoffs were planned.

Buried in Obama’s stimulus plan is a giant leap towards imposing a government takeover of all health care. Billions of dollars will flow to a newly formed bureaucracy called the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. As in Canada and England health care will be rationed. This agency will deem who will be unworthy of care because of age or severity of illness. Decisions that in the past that were made between a doctor and the patient will be gone. This bureaucracy will maintain an electronic database giving it access to everyone’s medical records so that decisions regarding rationing of care can be made. Why was this put in the Obama’s stimulus plan? The fact that there was no debate on this is frightening. It’s not how the country is supposed to work. So much for Obama’s campaign promise that the American people would have the same health care plan as the members of Congress.

We were told that last September’s $700 billion bailout was necessary to deliver us from that crisis and now $350 billion cannot be accounted for. National debt as a part of GNP is now projected to be 13.5%. Historically it’s been between 2 to 4% and we’ve always recovered from recessions which normally last 18 months. The Democrats who are in power are behaving like out of control adolescents who now have the ability to do whatever they want. His cabinet appointee’s alone have been found to owe $450,000 in back taxes. Obama promised hope and change. He is delivering on his promise to radically change America. The hope part of the equation is where he will fail miserably.