Most Red Ink Ever: Congratulations On Your ‘Historic’ Presidency, Obama

Virginia Slims used to run an ad campaign called, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” The ads for the women’s-marketed cigarette brand ran on the theme that it was hip and modern for women to smoke. But the hidden subtext of the campaign was, “Look how far you’ve come: now you can die a nasty preternatural death of cancer just like the men.”

In a lot of ways, Barack Obama is the new “You’ve come a long way, baby” poster boy.  He was marketed as the historic first black president in American history – but now that we’ve come this far, we’re going to see our nation perish to a cancer of “Marxist-red” ink.

A couple of truly terrifying articles who just what an unmitigated – and historic – disaster Barack Obama’s presidency has been in just six short months:

Obama’s 09 deficit exceeds all eight years of Bush red ink
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
08/25/09 3:08 PM EDT

How much is President Obama boosting federal spending? The Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl puts a little perspective on the numbers made public today:

· This year, Washington will spend $30,958 per household, tax $17,576 per household, and borrow $13,392 per household. This spending is not just temporary: President Obama would permanently keep annual spending between $5,000 and $8,000 per household higher than it had been under President Bush.
· The 22 percent spending increase projected for 2009 represents the largest government expansion since the 1952 height of the Korean War (adjusted for inflation). Federal spending is up 57 percent since 2001.

· The 2009 budget deficit will be larger than all budget deficits from 2002 through 2007 combined. More than 43 cents of every dollar Washington spends in 2009 will have been borrowed.

· One would expect the post-recession deficit to revert back to the $150 billion to $350 billion budget deficits that were typical before the recession. Instead, by 2019, the President forecasts a $917 billion budget deficit, a public debt of 77 percent of GDP, and annual net interest spending of $774 billion.

· The White House projects $10.6 trillion in new deficits between 2009 and 2019—nearly $80,000 per household in new borrowing.

· None of these estimates include the cost of health reform.

· The White House underestimates future budget deficits by trillions of dollars by (1) assuming that discretionary spending will be frozen to inflation for the next decade, (2) assuming that cap-and-trade revenues will be available to finance a Make Work Pay credit (the House-passed bill allocates those revenues elsewhere), (3) assuming health care reform will be deficit-neutral, and (4) assuming certain tax increases that are unlikely to be enacted.

Exceeding eight years of Bush deficits in just six months?  You’ve come a long, way, baby.

Most red ink ever: $9 trillion over next decade

By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press Writer Jim Kuhnhenn, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – In a chilling forecast, the White House is predicting a 10-year federal deficit of $9 trillion — more than the sum of all previous deficits since America’s founding. And it says by the next decade’s end the national debt will equal three-quarters of the entire U.S. economy.

But before President Barack Obama can do much about it, he’ll have to weather recession aftershocks including unemployment that his advisers said Tuesday is still heading for 10 percent.

Overall, White House and congressional budget analysts said in a brace of new estimates that the economy will shrink by 2.5 to 2.8 percent this year even as it begins to climb out of the recession. Those estimates reflect this year’s deeper-than-expected economic plunge.

The grim deficit news presents Obama with both immediate and longer-term challenges. The still fragile economy cannot afford deficit-fighting cures such as spending cuts or tax increases. But nervous holders of U.S. debt, particularly foreign bondholders, could demand interest rate increases that would quickly be felt in the pocketbooks of American consumers.

Amid the gloomy numbers on Tuesday, Obama signaled his satisfaction with improvements in the economy by announcing he would nominate Republican Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve. The announcement, welcomed on Wall Street, diverted attention from the budget news and helped neutralize any disturbance in the financial markets from the high deficit projections.

The White House Office of Management and Budget indicated that the president will have to struggle to meet his vow of cutting the deficit in half in 2013 — a promise that earlier budget projections suggested he could accomplish with ease.

“This recession was simply worse than the information that we and other forecasters had back in last fall and early this winter,” said Obama economic adviser Christina Romer.

Let’s go back to a couple of Wall Street Journal articles to see the patent falsehood to the claim that Obama didn’t know how bad things really were:

1) “Obama Budget Relies on Rosy Economic Forecasts” – February 26, 2009.  Liberals have tried to assure everyone, “Nobody could have known…”  But to quote Obama’s campaign rhetoric, “Yes, we can.”  At least if you write for the Wall Street Journal or a similar publication that doesn’t get it’s talking points from the Obama White House.  People with half a brain (which understandably excludes the overwhelming majority of liberals) knew that Obama was pumping manure and offering one false promise based on one false assumption after another.

The truth is that there were plenty of dire forecasts and claims that Obama’s numbers didn’t jive with reality; the fact that the White House didn’t listen isn’t anyone’s fault but Obama’s.

2) “Obama’s Rhetoric Is The Real Catastrophe” – February 13, 2009.  Barack Obama repeatedly fearmongered the economy by comparing it to the Great Depression in order to force his ill-fated $3.27 trillion stimulus fiasco through Congress.  The porkulus package was rushed through the legislative branches so quickly that no one actually even had a chance to read the darn thing – and then Obama took four days to sign the damn thing so he could have fun in Chicago.

Obama promised that if his stimulus was passed he would create hundreds of thousands of jobs and keep unemployment under 8% – and the reality has been an even bigger dud than the most conservative Republican predicted it would be.

Obama and his apologists are trying to argue that they didn’t know that the economy was so bad, but that is the most transparent and pathetic excuse given the fact that they repeatedly compared the state of the economy to the Great Depression.  Here’s the question, when they did that, were they simply demonizing, demagoguing, and fearmongering – thinking all the while that they were actually lying – or were they telling the truth as they understood it (i.e. that things were catastrophically bad)?  If the latter, their excuse that they didn’t know things were actually so bad simply vaporizes – because how could our present economy be worse than the Great Depression which they were comparing it too?  If the former, then Obama is literally a demon who cynically hurt tens of millions of Americans by driving down the economy merely to sell his self-serving political agenda.

That Obama and his Democrat allies are liars is already a given, it’s simply a question of when they lied.  And we can only hope that he is incompetent in his governance, rather than despicable in his deceitful and cynical manipulation.

As for unemployment “heading for 10%,” I personally agree with respected analyst Meredith Whitney: I see unemployment going to 13% or HIGHER.  By 2011, nearly half of the mortgages in our nation will be “underwater,” with owners owning more on the homes than the homes will be worth.  Obama has done virtually nothing to address the fundamental problem underlying why our economy crashed in the first place; and we’re going to pay dearly for that failure.

Let me tell you, as someone who pointed out that Barack Obama was woefully and terribly inexperienced and not up to the job over a year ago, the community-organizer-in-chief is simply not up to the job.  And neither are the radical leftwing punks that he has primarily surrounded himself with.

The liberals began to shrilly claim that Bush was incompetent during his second term over the issue of his handling of Iraq; but it needs to be pointed out that Bush ultimately DID succeed in Iraq – and by pursuing the “surge strategy” that Democrats and Obama himself demonized.  Bush won the war in Iraq even while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was wailing, “I believe that this war is lost.”

But now, only months into his presidency, even the LEFT is starting to distrust Obama’s competence.  This isn’t a partisan issue anymore – liberals are beginning to doubt Obama’s competence to accomplish his liberal agenda.  Democrats themselves are pointing out all the things Obama’s done wrong, and failed to do right.  And – while I cheer Obama’s inability to succeed in his socialism – that’s still bad, because we have no real leader, and we’re going to increasingly start drifting as a nation.

Yeah, you’ve come a long way, Barry Hussein.  You’ve come all the way from the “historic presidency of the first African-American in the White House,” to the most historic failure that the White House has ever seen.  And your policies are proving to be such a historic failure after only six months that this nation may literally not survive the remaining 3 1/2 years of your term until we can vote you out of office and be finally rid of you.

It is a terrible and tragic shame that the mainline media propagandists fixated so much on the color of Barack Obama’s skin that they failed to look at the color of his failed ideology or his complete lack of necessary experience to lead this country.

Tags: 8%, budget deficit, Bush, competence, deficit, Economy, fearmongering, first black president, forecasters, incompetence, inexperienced, largest government expansion, Marxist, mortgage, recession, red ink, stimulus, unemployment