The Binge
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By Congressman John Carter
It took President George Bush eight years in office, seven years at war, the economic slowdown after 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, the biggest increase in federal education spending ever with No Child Left Behind, the addition of prescription drug coverage to Medicare, the start of the recession in 2008, and the $750 billion Wall Street bailout last fall to rack up $2.75 trillion in federal red ink.
It took President Barack Obama just 38 days to beat that record.
Hiring Democrats to straighten out the federal deficit turned out to be the same as hiring Foster Brooks to inventory the liquor store.
The Obama Administration budget which was released last week contains a total $2.867 trillion in deficit spending, just a little more than a month after his January 20 inauguration.
This budget creates an astounding $1.75 trillion dollar deficit for just a single year.
And that’s not counting the $75 billion mortgage relief plan the President asked Congress to pass immediately, or another $750 billion he asked Congress to pre-approve if he determines he wants to give more bailouts to the banking industry.
We are now on a course straight for national bankruptcy and a catastrophic devaluation of the U.S. dollar unless we can turn this around over the next couple years.
Conservatives in Congress from both parties must convince the Administration to listen to alternative economic advice and turn the wheel immediately to avert disaster. This kind of red ink will keep us in recession, if not depression, for the next twenty years if we let it stand.
And what are we getting for this sacrifice?
The so-called Stimulus bill spends less than half of its $787 billion in the next two years to help us out of recession, and contains thousands of earmarks, in spite of the President’s statement to the contrary.
Specific language to pay for a high-speed train between Disneyland and Las Vegas with federal tax dollars might not be an earmark in Chicago, but don’t try to sell that to folks in Texas.
Meanwhile the White House budget openly admits nearly 9,000 earmarks, including giveaways to build a World Trade Center in Montana, potato cloning in Maine, and a planetarium in Preoria.
The White House budget not only is a world-record in deficit spending, it raises taxes in the middle of a recession. That is the same formula attempted by Presidents Herbert Hoover in 1930 and Jimmy Carter in 1978, with disastrous economic results.
The Obama tax plan calls for a new environmental tax, a “cap and trade” system. Under this plan, businesses that produce carbon emissions such as power companies or livestock producers would pay a new federal tax on those emissions. Only in truth, they won’t be paying them – you will, in your power bill, at the grocery store, and at the gas pump, as these businesses pass along these higher production costs in the form of higher consumer prices. That’s the last thing we need in a recession, when families are trying to stretch every penny as far as they can.
The further outrage is that wherever this has been tried, such as Germany, the results have been a disaster. Air quality has not improved, while consumer costs have skyrocketed and fraudulent trading schemes for “carbon credits” have flourished.
The final result of this world-record spending spree is that the Obama Administration budget and stimulus package creates the largest deficit – using any and all definitions – in U.S. history.
The Administration claims that by 2013 the deficit will drop to “just” $533 billion. But they fail to point out that using the same prediction guidelines the deficit then continues growing the next year and is back over $700 billion by 2019, as the baby boomer retirement starts to pile up in earnest on Social Security and Medicare funds.
We needed to pass reasonable legislation to help our economy get back on track, but going on this kind of a spending binge is not the way to do it.
These bills, if left in place, will not only fail to combat this recession, but will kill future job growth, and lead to a permanent loss in the value of the dollar.
It’s time we went on the wagon. We can begin by simply eliminating every earmark – both Republican and Democrat – from both the stimulus bill and the budget. We should continue by dropping the tax increases, especially the outrageous “cap and trade” proposal. The finishing touch should be a simple spending freeze on the budget for a year.
Yet every one of these commonsense solutions was rejected by House and Senate Democrats. So for now the binge continues. Let’s hope that voters remember why they woke up with such a headache in 2010.