Yesterday, while grilling Treasury Secretary Timothy ‘Wonder Boy’ Geithner, Sen. Judd Gregg gave the Obama Administration a good old-fashioned thumping:
In his opening statement, Gregg politely called the administration’s budget forecast a lie.
“The argument that it cuts the debt in half in four years is, ahh, is truly spurious,” he told Geithner … Gregg said the budget is essentially “putting on our children’s backs a debt they can never get out from underneath.”
He added pointedly, “I think we’re putting at risk not only our children’s future, we’re clearly putting at risk the value of a dollar and our ability to sell debt.”
[…]
“The argument that this budget doesn’t have tax increases [on everyone] is, I think, an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ view of the budget,” he said.
He challenged the budget’s math on cutting the debt: “When you take the deficit and quadruple it and then you cut it and half, that’s like taking four steps back and two steps forward. That’s not making any progress; you’re still going backwards.”
Gregg questioned why any foreign country would continue to buy up U.S. debt: “Because if I’m in the international marketplace, and I’m looking at this budget, I’m saying to myself, ‘Where’s the discipline? Where’s the containment?’ There isn’t any.”
And Gregg was simply piling on what Warren Buffett said a few days earlier, when he described the current recession as “an economic Pearl Harbor,” then ripped the Obama Administration’s handling of the situation:
… people knew in a general way what had to be done and they knew who they had to respond to a leader who was unquestionably the commander and chief. And so you didn’t have–start congressional hearings on December 8th, you know, that were going to last for weeks while all of the commanders and the various people were in various ways pilloried or taunted or whatever about `Why in the world did they let this happen?’ and the Republicans didn’t say, `You Democrats have been in since 1933, and it’s all your fault.’ None of that.
… if you’re in a war, and we really are on an economic war, there’s a obligation to the majority to behave in ways that don’t go around inflaming the minority. If on December 8th when–maybe it’s December 7th, when Roosevelt convened Congress to have a vote on the war, he didn’t say, `I’m throwing in about 10 of my pet projects,’ and you didn’t have congress people putting on 8,000 earmarks onto the declaration of war in 1941.
… I don’t think anybody on December 7th would have said a `war is a terrible thing to waste, and therefore we’re going to try and ram through a whole bunch of things and–but we expect to–expect the other party to unite behind us on the–on the big problem.’ It’s just a mistake, I think, when you’ve got one overriding objective, to try and muddle it up with a bunch of other things.
Wow. I’m grateful to see some big-league hitters (outside of the conservative blogosphere) finally call down the Obama Administration and expose their transparent attempts to use fear and uncertainty as leverage against common sense as they try to sell America a socialist utopia big government snake oil cure for all that currently ails us.
