We all expected this explosion of spending under Obama, but could we really have predicted that he’d spend away the future while simultaneously pontificating about fiscal responsibility?

After he signed a law last week authorizing the U.S. Treasury to borrow an additional $1.9 trillion, President Barack Obama delivered a characteristically sanctimonious speech. It was about his deep commitment to frugality.
 
“After a decade of profligacy, the American people are tired of politicians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk when it comes to fiscal responsibility,” he said. “It’s easy to get up in front of the cameras and rant against exploding deficits. What’s hard is actually getting deficits under control. But that’s what we must do. Like families across the country, we have to take responsibility for every dollar we spend.”

To put Obama’s Olympian hypocrisy in perspective, one need only examine the federal budget tables posted on the White House website by Obama’s own Office of Management and Budget.
 
They reveal these startling facts: When calculated by the average annual percentage of the Gross Domestic Product that he will spend during his presidency, Obama is on track to become the biggest-spending president since 1930, the earliest year reported on the OMB’s historical chart of spending as a percentage of GDP. When calculated by the average annual percentage of GDP he will borrow during his presidency, Obama is on track to become the greatest debter president since Franklin Roosevelt.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? How can someone so blatantly say one and do another and get away with it? One has to conclude that either Obama is a pathological liar, or insane.

Who would benefit from all of Obama’s grand plans?

When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating. – Frederic Bastiat

It takes one lousy SOB to try and profit off the backs of others – unfortunately, having a pile of taxpayer money around brings out the lousy SOB’s in droves. These are the people who would knock granny down in order to get their fill – and they will be the prime beneficiaries of Obamunism…just as they have been the prime beneficiaries of all these socialist, tax-and-spend schemes since FDR.

Can’t just sit there hoping Obama’s warmed-over FDR/Carterism will do the trick:

As our case is new, we must think and act anew. – Abraham Lincoln

Time to shake off the shackles of a century of liberalism and start heading in a new direction – and some times, in order to go forward, one must go back to where one screwed up and choose the right path, this time.

Last week, Politico highlighted ”seven things the White House wants reporters to write” about Obama’s first 100 days in office…

Here’s each point, and my rebuttal.

Obama is a promise-keeper.

Now, a few bloggers, including myself, have regularly blogged about Obama’s broken promises for American Issues Project for a couple months now. There has been no lack of material for this. His broken promises range from such things as failing to recognize the Armenian genocide, despite saying he would during the campaign. Other broken promises include not taxing the poor, getting a rescue dog for his daughters, leading by principle rather than polls, cutting spending, not negotiating with Hamas, just to name a few.

And his promise for more transparency was clearly bogus as well.

This NRSC ad pretty much sums it up…

Obama is a game-changer.

Obama may be changing things, but not for the better. And clearly, his belief that reaching out to our enemies would strengthen us is beyond absurd and shows no sign of producing results. Despite original reports that Obama made significant progress with Raul Castro regarding human rights, freedom of the press, political prisoners, etc., it was revealed a few days later that Obama “misintepreted” Castro’s comments. Obama, in seeking the approval of foreign leaders, resorts to blaming and apologizing for the United States for various things, undermining our moral authority.

Obama is the decider.

If Obama is the decider, then how come he claims he was unaware of the AIG bonuses shifting blame away from himself and towards Chris Dodd. If Obama is the decider, what does that say about his poor decisions in choosing his cabinet? What does that say about his lack of immediate, decisive action with the Somali pirate hostage mess? Obama has shown zero accountability in his 100 days and probably won’t ever. 

Obama’s not in the bubble.

Obama claimed to be unaware of the tax day tea parties. Obama claimed to be unaware of the AIG bonuses, which he signed into law. He has actually claimed to unaware of a lot of things recently. So, it certainly looks like he is in a bubble.

Obama is not FDR. / Obama is FDR.

Obama’s administration is desperately trying to lower expectations, while simultaneously elevating Obama to a historical greatness he cannot possibly achieve. Obama certainly won’t be as effective as FDR. but he certainly has similiar socialist ideals as the president whose policies kept our country in the Great Depression far longer than it had to. Sadly the passage of time has given the negative impacts of FDR’s policies ample opportunity to be distorted by those who want to rewrite history. But, if greatness is what Obama is going after, his incompetence, and the incompetence of those around him are making sure he will never achieve it.

Obama is one cool cucumber.

Obama’s hesistance over the Somali pirate hostage situation stands in contrast to the notion that Obama is cool under pressure.  This swine flu deal. The government’s response to the situation has been inadequate and half-assed compared to the how they’ve characterized the problem. And of course, there have been ample stories questioning whether Obama has too much on his plate, which is pathetic because he doesn’t have a greater set of problems and issues to face as any of his predecessors. The issue isn’t whether he has too much, it is whether he is handling what he has well. And he isn’t. Not at all.

On the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Where-Do-You-Republicans-Get-Off-Questioning-Us? “stimulus” bill:

Yet perhaps the clincher is the answer to a bigger question: how did the Great Depression end? It didn’t stop with the conservative suggestion: slashed spending, slashed debt and slashed government activity. It ended with precisely the opposite: the vast fiscal stimulus of the Second World War. The government sent debt soaring to its highest levels in US history (until today) in order to spend more than ever before. It set up the longest boom in US history.

Uh, no. It wasn’t the massive spending of WWII which got us out of the Depression, it was the fact that of the major industrial nations of the world (USA, USSR, Germany, Japan, UK and to a lesser extent France and Italy) only the United States emerged unscathed from WWII in a world in which there was massive war damage to be repaired. In 1945, if you wanted a manufactured item, the United States and Britain were the only fully operational economies, and Britain was flat broke. Couple this with the entirely unforeseen population boom resultant upon increased food supplies and vastly improved public health efforts and, voila!, you’ve got a post-WWII American economic boom. But it was a boom which was, from the start, living on borrowed time.

Absent a massive restructuring of the post-WWII American economy to return it to its pre-Depression free market model, it was only a matter of time before the rebuilt industrial nations – joined by other nations rapidly industrializing – began to eat into America’s market share. The pinch started in the 1960’s but only really began to be felt when the bill came due for Vietnam and the Great Society at the same time the Arabs pulled their first oil embargo, sending energy costs in America soaring. From then on until Reagan, the American economy sputtered along unable to cope … the high tax, high spend, high regulation economy built by FDR simply could not provide growth when this started to require rapid innovation – we were heading back into the Great Depression when we fortunately elected Reagan who lowered taxes and cut regulations…unfortunately, he was unable to bring spending under control, so the seeds of FDR were still there, waiting for the perfect liberal storm to have another go at wrecking the economy.

Here we now stand, poised at the same position we were at the start of the Great Depression with a choice to make – follow the myth of FDR, or understand that you cannot spend your way into wealth? Upon our decision here much depends. Obama and his Democrats are incapable of the decision because they are unaware that the FDR model even has an alternative, let alone a more successful one. Only we Republicans have the knowledge necessary to steer America out of our economic morass, and we are completely shut out of power until at least after the 2010 mid-terms. Rather a tricky situation.

Hadn’t even thought of that – this is our first recession with the Boomers in full charge of our nation:

If anyone wished to know what the baby-boomer generation would do when, in its full maturity, it hit its first self-created, big-time recession, I think we are seeing the hysterical results. After two decades of unprecedented economic growth, rampant consumer spending, and unimaginable borrowing to satisfy our insatiable appetites, we are suddenly going into even larger debt and printing trillions of dollars in paper money to ensure that someone else after we are gone pays the debt. As if the permanent solution to a financial panic and years of spending wealth we didn’t create were a government take-over of the economy in the manner we currently witness in Spain, Italy, and Greece—or the high-tax, high-spend ethos of a bankrupt California.

The reaction to the economic panic was sort of analogous to the call to ‘charge it!’ after 9/11 (cf. Ike’s fights about the surtax to pay for Korea), or to the Iraq 2006 upsurge in violence, when suddenly our leaders declared the war lost, blamed the nebulous “they” for tricking them into voting for the war, and calling for immediate withdrawals and retreats. Ditto the Stalag-Gulag Guantanamo that, by January 19, had ruined the Constitution, shredded the Bill of Rights, and forever tarnished our reputation. Yet, on the 20th, it was suddenly complex and problematic, and required a “task force” to do a year-long inquiry into the bad and worse choices confronting us. At some point in all this serial hysteria, we are beginning to see the problem is not in the stars of the economy or of the war, but in ourselves—a weird generation that, when it finally came of age, proved to be just about what we could expect of it from what we saw in its youth.

Whom are we bailing out? In large measure, we are bailing out middle-aged Baby Boomers who have essentially been in charge of messing up the nation since about 1964. They can’t get anything right, and lacking any sense of proportion, they went on a binge of borrowing and spending and now that the bill has come due – and Mom and Dad no longer being able to bail them out – they simply want the government to cover for their error.

The reason I’m really on the “sobriety and solidarity” kick is because we do need to pay the price of our foolishness and learn our lesson well. We can’t borrow and spend our way to wealth. We can’t have a great economy if we don’t grown, mine and make things (sorry, environmentalists, but we will need to cut some things down and dig some things up – and then turn said things into products people want). Usury might be good for a short bit, but the reason God warned us off it was because its both predatory and stupid. We can’t farm out child-rearing to schools and day care centers. We can’t all live like kings. It is high time we grew up.

Our liberals are great at showing their solidarity with others – but the problem is they are just showing, they are not being. We need to be in solidarity with each other – and we need to be sober about what we do. Being in solidarity with our fellows doesn’t mean going to a demonstration or making a donation – it means actually going out there and doing for others, at no thought to the cost to ourselves and with not only no expectation of reward, but a downright insistence on not being rewarded.

75 or so years ago FDR and the liberals of the day said we can have it all – we can take time off and still be rich. All it took was fiat money, high interest rates and government spending as much as it could. For a while there, it seemed to work – but even when it was apparently working, this was the residual effect of the hard work still being done and the economic rationality still remaining from the pre-New Deal economy. We’ve been scammed – or, more accurately, we scammed ourselves. We wanted to believe that we could have it all, because believing such a thing is far easier than the difficult task of actually doing something for others. Its all come smashing down, and it won’t get genuinely better until we, as a people, take full responsibility for our errors and insist upon doing the right thing from now on.

Here’s his take:

…the plunge in consumer prices is a great thought. It is a tax cut of massive proportions. The drop in retail gas prices alone has been variously estimated at $350 billion in new consumer purchasing power. In fact, real average weekly earnings have now risen four straight months on the back of the CPI drop. Over the past year, this key measure is up nearly 3 percent.

And while consumer prices are deflating, producer prices — which represent wholesale costs to business — have been deflating even faster with the plunge in energy and other commodities. Consequently, corporate profit margins are improving as costs drop faster than prices. This important development is also overlooked.

Inflation is the cruelest tax of all. It is a prosperity killer. But the inflationary decline is the most pleasant tax cut of all, and is a key part of the recovery process.

Although the stock market has stumbled in the new year, it too will benefit from the inflation tax cut. Remember, the capital-gains tax is un-indexed for inflation. As prices moved up towards 6 percent last summer, stocks moved down big-time. Now, however, the decline of inflation is reducing the effective tax rate on real capital gains from roughly 40 percent last summer to only 15 percent through December. This is a huge tax cut on stocks and wealth-creation. While President-elect Obama appears to be willing to leave the Bush tax cuts untouched in 2009, and perhaps 2010, the falling consumer price index is slashing the cap-gains tax rate in real terms.

Indeed – if we generally leave things alone, things will start to improve…just as they would have started to improve if FDR had left things alone and had Jimmy Carter left things alone. Problem is, Obama is the direct political descendant of FDR and Carter, and he’s not going to leave things alone. Democrats, you see, actually believe that FDR’s spending cured the Depression. I know, hard to believe that someone could be that obtuse, but we’re dealing with Democrats, here.

The $1,000,000,000,000.00 or so stimulus package is going to get passed, in some form, in the next month or two. What this means is just about the time the market is finished shaking out the bad investments and clearing the decks for a new round of growth, Obama’s spending plan will both suck up dollars which will be needed for rebuilding the economy and it will drive up inflation as it adds a huge amount of currency to an economy which already has too much on hand for the money in circulation. All Obama need do at that point to turn a recession into a depression is to start enacting various protection measures for US industry.

We GOPers lack the power to stop Obama and his Democrats. Now, we’ll reap the benefits of what will prove liberalism’s fourth economic failure in the United States, but the problem is that we still have to weather the storm between the opening of the Obama Error, and the shutting of it down either in 2010 or 2012.

The One has advised us that we’re to have trillion dollar deficits for at least some years. Only one thing wrong with that – we don’t have that much money, and as the rest of the world slides into recession, there will be no one to loan us that much money Additionally, there are practical difficulties of getting Obama’s plan passed:

The forecast Wednesday of a jaw-dropping $1.2 trillion one-year federal budget deficit will make it harder for President-elect Barack Obama to win broad support for a massive stimulus package that would add even more to the red ink.

With his party controlling both the House of Representatives and the Senate, Obama’s still likely to get the OK for spending and tax cuts that cost $1 trillion or more over two years and are designed to jump-start the economy and create or save 3 million jobs.

However, while many economists, business groups and politicians agree on the need for something dramatic, Obama now concedes that he’ll have to wait until February to get a bill to sign. He’ll probably find conservative “blue dog” Democrats as well as Republicans balking at the idea of borrowing another $1 trillion on top of this new annual deficit.

They could deny Obama the kind of broad, bipartisan approval that he hopes will signal not only that he’s changed the political culture of a divided Washington but also that he’s put forward a plan that’s widely popular. Such approval is crucial as he moves to rebuild trust in the government and the economy.

We conservatives will find it endlessly amusing that the liberal Democrat plan to allow people who can’t afford a home to get loans is what triggered the de-facto national bankruptcy which will, in turn, defeat the liberals’ plans to remake America now that they’ve regained full power. Bankruptcy? Yeah – I understand that the total liability of the federal government – including unfunded mandates like Social Security (which you liberals prevented us from fixing and which will now add to our amusement as you stare in slack-jawed disbelief at the result of your own purblind idiocy) – exceeds the total wealth of the American people. Part of this imbalance is caused by the collapse in home values, but the inflated home values were probably just masking reality for a while. Essentially – and make no mistake about it, President Bush and plenty of Republicans share blame on this, including yours, truly who didn’t fight hard enough against spending – we’ve spent ourselves into oblivion. And Obama wants to spend an extra trillion or so per year to fix America!

It is now time for retrenchment and reform – we need to drastically cut spending and completely overhaul the way we do government business. Curiously enough, if Obama would put himself at the head of such a reform movement, he’d probably be able to carry it off – and secure for himself not only re-election in 2012, but a high place in American history, alongside the likes of Lincoln and Reagan. The problem is that Obama has just created the post of “chief performance officer“, as if adding one more bureaucrat to the mix will suddenly get our government working efficiently for the good of the American people. I mean, I do admire the spirit there, Barry, but I’m sorry that I’m suppressing convulsions of laughter…its like someone is writing a comedy script to satirize the Obama Administration…but this is for real. We need bold, new initiatives – we’re getting window dressing. What’s next? Bureau of Hope within the Department of Change?

We can’t tax more money, we can’t borrow more money – we can print money, and I’ll bet that Obama will try a bit of that, thus bringing us into a replay of the 1970’s “stagflation” (for you youngsters, this is the “impossible” situation where you have both a stagnant economy and high inflation). If only the blinders would come off – and I pray they do. After all, FDR ran as a tax-cutting, budget balancer and wound up the big spender…perhaps Obama’s run as a big spender will wind up as a tax-cutting, budget balancing Administration?

We can hope – and that would, indeed, be a change.

So says California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer – and I believe he’s correct. With California’s State deficit possibly going to $40 billion over the next two years and one city already declaring itself bankrupt in a move which might well become a trend in California municipalities, we can say with some confidence that California, in large measure, is bankrupt. I also happen to think that not only is California bankrupt, but the United States and the entire world is broke. We’ve got this absurd financial house of cards which is “financed” by fiat money, the value of which can change minute by minute. The world is riddled with debt, a very large portion of which is actually unrecoverable (meaning that the options are to write it off, or figure out some way to loan money to the borrowers to pay off current debt holders and hope that no one ever figures out this is a Ponzi scheme). Resources are locked away at the behest of environmentalist kooks. Government confiscates wealth from some to give it to others. Aging populations equal a massive unfunded mandate around the world as fewer and fewer workers are depended upon to provide pensions for more and more retirees. The crunch has come – fake money and quasi-socialism have done all they can to mask the utter failure of the Statist-Corporatist model.

Time for a change. And not just hopeful change – but real change. A change which will put our fiscal house back in order with hard money, balanced budgets and a rigid adherence to sobriety in our financial decisions. The free ride is over, and its time to pay the piper. The good news is that the catastrophe isn’t permanent – unless we make it so, as FDR and his Democrats did back in the 1930’s.

First off, Obama has promised a “middle class tax cut” – what this is, exactly, is hard to define, but it seems to revolve around some Democratic focus-group results showing that middle class people are concerned with middle class issues and thus Democrats better come up with something to appeal to middle class people. The only track record we have on this particular Democratic program is Bill Clinton’s 1992 promise to give us a middle class tax cut. Sadly, Bill was unable to provide this as a spending binge commanded all funds possible…including a retroactive tax increase. We can, I believe, expect Obama’s tax cut to become a tax increase, too.

Obama’s people seem to have a hankering for a thing called the “fairness doctrine” – this is predicated upon the theory that liberalism is the default position and any non-liberal assertion in the media must be countered by a liberal response. Conservatives don’t give a two-penny dam what some liberal twit or other is saying on an obscure radio station and thus won’t avail themselves of the fairness doctrine. Liberals, on the other hand, care very much what the highly rated Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, Ingram, etc say on the radio, and they will launch complaint after complaint regarding conservative comment and will demand equal time to respond. This intense harassment will be coupled with the sort of thuggish attacks on criticism we’ve seen by Team Obama against any of those who dare to question The One’s past, programs or motivations. Boiled down, we can expect a severe crimping of free speech if Obama is elected.

Senator Obama advocated a cut and run from Iraq out of a desire to build up kook left support for his candidacy. We can expect Obama to treat American foreign and military policy as if they were an adjunct to his personal, political fortunes. Only if it seems to be useful to Obama will any particular policy – good or bad – be followed. If it so happens that American need and Obama desire match, then that is fine and dandy – but if they don’t, America will come in a poor second. We can expect Obama’s foreign and military policy to be a compendium of Clinton’s erratic behavior coupled with Carter’s penchant for finding fault with America’s friends and excuses for America’s enemies.

Obama’s people are of that line of thinking which figures that Israel is the problem and if we can just figure out a way to get terrorists to love Israel, we’ll have peace – that the terrorists will never love Israel and will consider all concessions to be a sign of weakness is not a concept Obama or his people are capable of grasping. We can expect Obama to continually pressure Israel to give ground and to never, ever take a strong stand against those who seek the destruction of Israel.

Have Democrats ever had a fiscal year in which they advocated an actual reduction in the number of dollars the federal government spends? No – and thus we can expect that any idea about cutting the size of government is dead as a doornail under Obama.

Have Democrats ever had a year when they looked around and couldn’t think of a single thing to increase government spending on? No – and thus we can expect Democrats to pile on as much spending as they can.

Have Democrats come through with their 2006 promise to run the most open and ethical government in history? No. Oh, you think Obama will? I guess you can make an argument for holding that position, but the odds are that it will be corrupt business as usual for the party which hammered GOPer Foley for writing a dirty e mail or two but can’t find it in itself to eject William “Cold Cash” Jefferson (D-LA) from the House.

Democrats exerted great efforts to prevent a reigning in of Fannie and Freddie before the crunch hit. Will they now actually keep an eye out for trouble and act in a timely manner to prevent it? Perhaps – but Obama and his Democrats give no indication of having learned anything from the financial debacle than to blame Republicans for their own failures…and if it works in 2008 by helping Dems to victory, what makes anyone think they’ll change their ways in 2009? We can expect Obama and his Democrats to grandstand on things like Gitmo – which isn’t an actual problem – while real crisis are allowed to fester until they become unmanageable.

The last time the US military was in better shape at the end of a Democratic Administration than it was at the beginning was FDR/Truman…but it took a World War to convince a Democratic Administration that maybe we needed a first class military. We can expect Obama to let things slide in this area – especially as he looks for money to spend on various liberal programs.

We can expect strenuous efforts on the part of Obama and his Democrats to stop any measures designed to limit voter fraud.

Behind rhetoric about secure borders, etc, we can expect Obama and his Democrats to do nothing about illegal immigration but very much to ensure that their votes are cast and counted in American elections, provided they vote Democrat.

Any chance an Obama Administration will appoint any judge anywhere who is not pre-approved by NARAL/ACLU/NOW? Not a chance – so, we can expect Obama to appoint only ultra-liberal, activist judges from top to bottom as vacancies occur.

All in all, we can expect an Obama Administration to be a complete disaster – there is no area in which Obama has a policy edge on John McCain…its all about advancing liberalism, liberal power, liberal wealth and liberal politicians. America is a fine thing and if its not too much trouble Obama will spare a moment for her, but America will have to get used to the fact – if Obama wins – that she is subordinate to Obama and his Democrat’s personal interests.

Bill Kristol thinks so:

Here’s the good news–and it’s really quite good. A reasonably conservative presidential candidate, leading a reasonably conservative party, has a good chance to win the general election. With a difficult task ahead of it–holding on to the White House for a third term, and in this case for the sixth out of the last eight–the GOP has lucked into having as its nominee John McCain, one of the most popular politicians in America.

What’s more, conservatism as a set of ideas is in pretty good shape. “Neoconservative” thinking on America’s place in the world has beaten back attempts to revive the crabbed “realism” of some congressional Republicans in the 1990s as a plausible approach for dealing with the world of the 21st century. And there is a resurgence of creative thinking on domestic policy, reminiscent of the neoconservatism of an earlier generation. Younger conservatives are displaying a welcome heterodoxy in their approach to health care, taxes, and family policy issues…

…Conservatives, in short, are adjusting to the times. This is a good thing, and is one of the neglected lessons of Ronald Reagan’s success: Reagan’s 1980 platform differed from Barry Goldwater’s in 1964. Consider further that 2008 is as far removed from 1980, as 1960 was from 1932. Movement liberalism in 1960 yearned for a purer, more orthodox FDR-style liberal than John F. Kennedy. Eleanor Roosevelt was appalled that the old guard had to give way. But it was surely better for liberals and liberalism that JFK called for a New Frontier rather than an extension of the New Deal.

And it may end up better for movement conservatism that we have McCain on top of the party, able to deflect the more absurd charges against conservatism (you know – the liberal shriek that we’re all a bunch of racist, sexist, homophobic theocrat-imperialists), while conservatism – as a political ideology – is able to advance. What we want is judges and bureaucrats who will adhere to the conservative line; what John McCain does on global warming is small beans compared to our ability to overturn anti-constitutional judicial rulings and use our regulatory power to actually de-regulate.

Think carefully, fellow conservatives, about what is at stake in November.