Sometime a while back there was a fooferrah over hundreds of pouty-lip lackwits sending self portraits to a designed-just-for website posing with signs apologizing to…well, the rest of the socialist world, I guess…for the election of George W. Bush. After Obama was elected a new site sprang up with portraits of young hopesters/changesters exuberant over the new…well, less Bushalogically focused…America. Bush voters were encouraged to repent against their sin and embrace a hopier, changier future.
For sheer comic value (I’m assuming the site was a deliberate and surreptitious ruse by the VRWC to elicit self-parody from left wingers) it was top-shelf loaded. Yeah, we could all laugh during those halcyon days between the election and inauguration. After the so-called stimulus bill passed, I mentioned that all the spending so far is before a budget (for 2010) has been submitted. Bush’s last budget was $2.9 trillion. Some commenters were kind enough to joke that Congress would pass a smaller budget in light of the stimulus.
Who really believes Congress will spend less than Bush in 2008? Or Obama circa 2009:
The proposed $3.55 trillion spending blueprint for the 2010 fiscal year that begins October 1 provides the broad outlines of a more detailed one to be released in April.
For liberal arts majors, that’s a 16.4% increase over the spendthrift Bush administration in 2008. After adding $150B of off-budget spending for the Iraq war tab onto the budget. And after auto bailouts, bank bailouts, stimuli.
An eye-popping $1.75 trillion deficit for the 2009 fiscal year underlined the heavy blow the deep recession has dealt to the country’s finances as Obama unveiled his first budget. That is the highest ever in dollar terms, and amounts to a 12.3 percent share of the economy — the largest since 1945. In 2010, the deficit would dip to a still-huge $1.17 trillion, Obama predicted.
With that backdrop, his budget represents a gamble that Americans are ready for the sort of change they embraced by electing him in November — a shift of wealth through higher taxes on the rich to pay for more government attention to healthcare, education, climate change and social programs.That doesn’t exactly sound like the bill of goods John Q. Public was being sold. I remember a more, “Crazy right-wingers are taking soundbites out of context to smear a moderate, centrist black man” zeitgeist. But when it comes to politics you see what you believe. I’m sorry. I though Change meant “Anybody but Bush”.
By my back envelope calculations that $1.75 trillion number seems low. We’re already upside down ~$1.5 trillion with the stimulus and bailout. Add another $450 billion to the Bush budget, figure tax receipts go way down during a recession and I see a $3 trillion deficit. Subject to increase pending any future “worst _________ since ___________.”
Obama can sign or not sign the budget bill he gets from Congress. He will sign any bill no matter how grotesquely bloated.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, praised Obama’s spending priorities and chided Republicans for what she saw as their new found interest in limited government.
“Perhaps … they (the Republicans) have amnesia,” Pelosi said, noting that with Bush at the helm they turned budget surpluses into deficits, in part through significantly higher government spending.Ug. Grog put hand in fire. Fire burn Grog. Now Grog put hand in fire longer and see what happen.
As I’ve said before, comparing Congress to the noble poo-flinging chimpanzee is an insult to apes.
I suggest Republicans play right into her hands. Submit an alternative budget of $2.75 trillion. With all the stimulus and bailout spending there’s bound to be $150 billion worth of spending that can be trimmed from Bush’s profligate $2.9 trillion budget of 2008. Bring the Iraq war on budget and it’s a wash. Is that too unreasonable in light of the $2 trillion we’ve already committed off-budget this year? I’m sorry. We’ve spent enough of the taxpayers’ money.
Bush is gone and the Republican Party had best refind their interest in limited government. God help us all if a few brave Democrats don’t join with them. Forecasting a smaller future deficit based on more spending, higher marginal tax rates, and energy taxation is folly of the highest order.
It was that kind of thinking that made the Depression great. Change meant exchanging the “failed policies of the last eight years” for the failed economic policies of the 1930’s and the failed energy policies of the 1970’s? How many leaches does it take to cure the patient?
I’m sorry.
