Neatly encapsulated:
It was surely an act of hubris for President Obama to ask Congress to approve a $3.6 trillion federal budget for 2010 that runs a trillion-dollars worth of red ink its first year and then projects half-trillion deficits every year thereafter for a decade. Congress has never before been asked to consider spending of such magnitude, not even during wartime. Obama’s budget proposal also included provisions committing the nation to far-reaching policy changes that are certain to drive federal taxes higher, send gasoline and electricity costs soaring, socialize doctors and patients by putting Washington bureaucrats in charge of health care, and make Uncle Sam the Daddy Warbucks of college tuition for everybody. . . . So how did Congress deal with this landmark legislation? The House of Representatives gave opponents exactly 20 minutes to present an alternative, then gaveled the Obama measure to approval. The Senate approved it after considering a handful of amendments. But note that even before the 2010 budget was approved, this Congress had approved spending more than $1.2 trillion, or $24 billion per day. That’s $1 billion every hour since the 111th Congress convened in January.
We can’t do this – it isn’t sustainable (to use a favored liberal word). When it comes crashing down – and it will, sure as night follows day – we’ll be under a mountain of debt which will take decades of sustained economic growth to get out of, but we won’t have the money necessary to invest in the economic activities which will would provide the wealth necessary to discharge the debt. Essentially, Obama and his Democrats are blithely spending us into oblivion because they are ignorant and think that the New Deal helped, so the Super-Duper Newer Deal will help even more.
If only we could get into their heads a bit and make them understand – the reason it costs $5,000 a month to pay for nursing home care is because Medicaid is willing to pay that…so regular folks who can afford $3,000 a month (and thus don’t qualify for Medicaid) are priced out of the market; the reason why the average in-State tuition for a public college is $18,000 is because the government backs loans and grants which allow kids to “afford” that high a tuition; the reason why health care costs in 2008 rose at twice the rate of inflation is because Medicare and Medicaid are willing to pay such extortionate prices, thus pricing Joe Average out of the market and forcing him to seek private or government insurance…on and on it goes; the reason things cost so much and thus seem to require government aid is because government aid is distorting the market price.
We won’t be able to make them see this – but as things fall apart we can craft a message which wins for us great power, and thus we can just show them, by actions, that the best means of doing things is to not have government do them except in a genuine, and temporary, emergency.
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