Obama Has Just Taken God Damn America To $16 Trillion In Debt (Mind You, Our Actual Debt Is $222 Trillion And SKYROCKETING)

Barack Obama fortuitously provides my setup for me as I point the angry finger of blame he once pointed right back in his fool face:

“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.” — Barack Obama, 3 July 2008

Obama gives us the relevant numbers himself: Bush gave us $4 trillion in debt over eight years and that was so irresponsible and such a failure in leadership that it’s “unpatriotic.”  Those are Obama’s own words that he was elected under.  And Obama started out with a national debt of $10 trillion and promised the American people he would cut the deficit in half during his first term.

That deficit that Obama promised to cut in half was $455 billion.  That is a fact as can be seen below.  Not only did Obama NOT keep his self-righteous, lying, hypocrite promise to cut the deficit in half in his first term, he has more than doubled that deficit each year of his presidency and one year MORE THAN TRIPLED it.  And not only has Obama given us trillion-PLUS dollar deficits every single year of his presidency, but in fact he has created the disastrous future of trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see until America collapses.

Obama demonized Bush for a debt that was so enormous that it would cost every man, woman and child in America $30,000 to pay.  And what did he do?  He gave us a debt that will now cost every man, woman and child in America more than $50,000 to pay!

It’s not just that Obama is a liar; he is a truly demonic liar. And Obama has been “governing” or “leading” by counting on his ability to lie faster than the other side can correct his lies.

Here are the official budget deficit numbers:

• 2011 – $1.5 trillion budget deficit (projected)
• 2010 – $1.3 trillion budget deficit
• 2009 – $1.4 trillion budget
• 2008 – $455 billion budget deficit
• 2007 – $162 billion budget deficit
• 2006 – $248.2 billion budget deficit
• 2005 – $319 billion budget deficit
• 2004 – $412.7 billion budget deficit
• 2003 – $377.6 billion budget deficit
• 2002 – $157.8 billion budget deficit
• 2001 – $128.2 billion budget surplus

It has become very difficult to estimate Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s deficits.  Because they have wickedly refused to even BOTHER to pass a budget as required by law for 1,224 days.  Republicans in the House have done their job every year they have governed, both during the time that they controlled both branches of the Congress in 2006 (when the final Republican congressional budget under Bush was just $162 billion) and since they retook the House in 2010.  But Democrats who control the Senate have refused to do their duty and pass ANY budget at ALL.

It’s official: We are now $16 trillion in debt
posted at 6:58 pm on September 4, 2012 by Erika Johnsen

That. Just. Happened. There’s been a bit of waffling on when exactly it occurred between last Friday and Tuesday, but regardless, that ship has sailed.

Total U.S. government debt eclipsed $16 trillion for the first time Friday, new government data show, as total federal borrowing continues marching toward the $16.394 trillion borrowing limit.

The Treasury Department said total government debt hit $16,015,769,788,215.80 on Friday, up $25 billion from the day before. The amount of federal debt subject to the borrowing limit is actually slightly less, as it doesn’t include several types of borrowing, and it stood at $15.977 trillion on Friday.

Ah yes, remember when Obama promised he’s cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term in office? Heh, that ol’ chestnut. In actuality, President Obama has added over $5.4 trillion to the debt during less than four years in office, more than any other president and approximately a trillion more than President Bush during his full two terms in office. So, there’s that.

Parting thought: How much is a trillion?

If Obama is a one-term president, which he himself by his own rhetoric said he ought to be, he will have added more than $6 trillion to the debt in his four years by the time he leaves office.  The same man who viciously demonized his predecessor for adding less than $5 trillion over EIGHT years.  The national debt is over $16 trillion now, and it’s going to keep piling on and piling on until January 2013.  With at least $500 billion in interest to pay on top of that.

But don’t forget the REAL debt is actually $222 trillion:

The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated (by us) using theCongressional Budget Office’s realistic long-term budget forecast — the Alternative Fiscal Scenario — is now $222 trillion. Last year, it was $211 trillion. The $11 trillion difference — this year’s true federal deficit — is 10 times larger than the official deficit and roughly as large as the entire stock of official debt in public hands.

Now, the fact of the matter is that 99.9 percent of that supermassive debt have been loaded on the back of America’s children – because Democrats love “free stuff” that SOMEBODY ELSE gets forced to pay for – was created by Democrat entitlement programs that should have never been passed in the first place.  Both Social Security and Medicare would have been FAR more stable and pay out FAR better benefits if they had been privatized from the very start as Republicans wanted.  But Democrats imposed their socialism by force and it is only a matter of time before their government fascist takeover implodes America.  Unless YOU’VE got $222 trillion in your pocket.

Democrats have murdered America.

What they’ve done to the country they’ve done to the liberal states and the liberal cities.   Go to Illinois, the king of the deadbeat states. You watch a 60 Minute Story and you will be PISSED at what slimebag Democrat cockroaches have done. Go to California, where Democrats have created a $500 BILLION unfunded pension black hole of doom. Look at America under Obama and take note that America just passed the $16 trillion mark that was $10 trillion when Bush left office. Barack Obama DEMONIZED George Bush for increasing the debt by $4 trillion over eight years – look what that Marxist weasel has done in HALF the time by piling on $6 trillion in debt in only FOUR years!!!

This election isn’t a “do-over.”  The odds are that Obama has already fatally wounded America with his insane spending and his bizarre “logic” and his constant fracturing of America on the basis of race and gender and income.  But if you vote for Obama now, you are literally voting for the suicide of America.

Obama’s And Democrats’ February Budget Deficit Of $229 Billion Is Almost FIFTY PERCENT MORE Than Last GOP Congress’ ENTIRE YEAR’S Deficit Under Bush

As insane as that sounds, it is true.  Democrats under Barack Obama managed to pull off a one-month deficit of $229 billion.  That is 41.4 percent higher than the ENTIRE YEARS’ BUDGET DEFICIT of $162 billion passed by the last Republican Congress under George W. Bush for fiscal year 2007.

From the Washington Times:

Govt. sets record deficit in February
By Stephen Dinan – The Washington Times
Thursday, March 8, 2012

The federal government recorded its worst monthly deficit in history in February, according to a preliminary report Wednesday from the Congressional Budget Office that said the deficit in fiscal year 2012 is already more than half a trillion dollars.

The CBO’s figures show that despite repeated efforts to trim spending, the government has borrowed 42 cents of every dollar it spent during the first five months of this fiscal year.

The nonpartisan agency projected the government will run a deficit of $229 billion in February, the highest monthly figure ever. The previous high was $223 billion a year ago, in February 2011.

It is the 41st straight month the government has run a deficit — itself a record streak that dates back to the final months of President George W. Bush’s tenure. Before now, the longest streak on record was 11 months.

For all of fiscal year 2012, which began Oct. 1, the budget analysts said the government has raised $869 billion in revenue but spent $1.5 trillion so far.

Congress and President Obama sparred for most of last year on how to cut spending, but the CBO’s figures show that spending has actually remained flat in 2012 once the timing of certain payments has been adjusted.

Mr. Obama last month released a budget that showed the government averaging $1 trillion deficits for the rest of this decade. House Republicans are working to write their own budget now, while Senate Democratic leader Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada has said he doubts his chamber will write a budget this year.

The Democrat Party is the party of demon-possessed insanity.  That’s the only way to put it.  Let’s consider the progression as shown in a Los Angeles Times article from 2008.  For a little background, the $162 billion deficit for 2007 was the last deficit passed by a Republican Congress while George Bush was president.  The very next year, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat-controlled House and Harry Reid and the Democrat-controlled Senate passed a budget with a deficit of $455 billion – which for the official record was 181 percent higher than the Republicans’ last deficit.  That is very nearly THREE TIMES the deficit from a party that had spent the last eight years demonizing Republicans for their spending.

Federal deficit hits record $455 billion
The shortfall for fiscal 2008 is larger than was feared. It is likely to be a key issue in the last weeks of the campaign.
October 15, 2008|Richard Simon | Times Staff

WASHINGTON — Compounding terrible economic news, budget officials announced Tuesday that the federal deficit has soared to a record $455 billion, injecting new urgency into the closing days of the presidential campaign about spending in Washington, including efforts to stem the financial disaster.

The final accounting for fiscal 2008 produced a larger shortfall than had been projected, reflecting the start of federal efforts to address the economic emergency. It is certain to become a significant issue in the campaign, confronting the candidates with new questions about their growing slate of proposals for new spending and tax cuts at a time when red ink is surging.

“The reality is that the next president will be inheriting a fiscal and economic mess of historic proportions — the legacy of President Bush’s failed policies,” said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. “It will take years to dig our way out.”

The deficit is likely to be even bigger next year as the country copes with the worst financial crisis since the Depression.

The new figure breaks the previous record deficit of $413 billion in 2004 and more than doubles the 2007 deficit of $162 billion. It has focused new attention on government spending, coming just days after the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits to record the overall national debt, which passed $10 trillion.

In Congress, the record deficit is likely to intensify debate over Democrats’ efforts to pass another economic stimulus package, perhaps worth $150 billion, and over the issue of fiscal discipline.

Administration officials blamed the deficit in large part on the nation’s economic troubles, which produced lower than expected tax revenues and led to passage of an economic stimulus package that included tax rebates.

Note that “blame Bush” has been the only Democrat strategy pretty much since Bush took office.  It has now dominated Barack Obama’s entire presidency up to this point and he will NEVER take responsibility for his failed economy.

Obama rammed a stimulus through Congress in 2009 that cost not a mere $150 billion, but $862 billion.  Obama’s “experts” assured us that if we passed this stimulus boondoggle, unemployment would never reach 8%.  It of course went to 10.4% and has NEVER got to 8% during Obama’s entire presidency.

Of course, the real unemployment rate is actually over NINETEEN PERCENT.  But Obama can keep playing with numbers to cover up that massive failure.  Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that the nonpartisan director of the nonpartisan CBO testified that Obama’s policies had destroyed jobs and would continue to destroy jobs.

Do you want to know why the stimulus didn’t work?  The answer is actually pretty damn simple: BECAUSE KEYNESIAN ECONOMIC STIMULUS PROGRAMS HAVE NEVER WORKED ANYWHERE.

And when you look around at all the countries that are doing better than the United States, the single common factor is that they didn’t pass a massive stimulus boondoggle like we did under Obama (see also here and here).

Which is why Obama’s stimulus actually RAISED unemployment.  And which is why Obama was forced to admit that he would leave unemployment higher than it was when he found it.

What’s funny is that Obama’s own damn experts admitted that Bush’s policies were better for the economy than Obama’s.  Which is probably why they were kicked out and Obama’s “economic team” has become a revolving door of incompetence since.

Oh, and by the way, the actual cost of Obama’s stimulus will actually end up being $3.27 TRILLION rather than a paltry $862 billion.  Just in case money or debt matters to you at all.

And the same Obama who admitted that his “shovel-ready stimulus wasn’t as shovel-ready as he thought” said that the only damn thing his one-track Marxist mind could think of was to double down and try ANOTHER failed stimulus boondoggle that would largely benefit his special interest just like his first one did.

And rather than do a damn thing to fix the broken economy, Obama and his Democrat fools spent over a year railroading the unconstitutional socialist takeover of our health system otherwise known as ObamaCare.  Which we keep finding out (remember when Nancy Pelosi said we’d have to pass ObamaCare to find out what is inside it?) is exploding the deficit and will KEEP exploding the deficit.

Welcome to God Damn America, people.  If you like it, vote for Obama again.  By the time this useful idiot of the coming Antichrist is finished, you won’t have a country left five years from now.

Actual U.S. Debt Exceeds GDP Of Entire Planet

Here’s one for you to put in your pipe to smoke on.  Even if the U.S. were to seize the wealth of the entire planet, and even if we taxed all the wealth of not only the rich but the miserably poor as well, we STILL couldn’t pay off the debts that Democrats demand that we keep adding to until after we’ve reached that “straw that broke the camel’s back” point:

True U.S. debt exceeds world GDP by $14 trillion
Obama 2010 budget deficit now 5 times larger than nation’s output
Posted: March 21, 2011
By Jerome R. Corsi

As the Obama administration prepares to finance a Fiscal Year 2011 budget  deficit expected to top $1.6 trillion, the American public is largely unaware that the true negative net worth of the federal government reached $76.3 trillion last year.

That figure was five times the 2010 gross domestic product of the United States and exceeded the estimated gross domestic product for the world by approximately $14.4 trillion.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. GDP for 2010 was $14.861 trillion. World GDP in 2010, according to the International Monetary Fund, was $61.936 trillion.

“As government obligations continue to spiral out of control and the U.S. government shows no willingness to make the magnitude of spending cuts required to return to fiscal responsible, the U.S. economy is headed to a great collapse coming in the form of a hyper-inflationary great depression,” says economist John Williams, author of the website Government Shadow Statistics.

Statistics generated in Williams’ most recent newsletter demonstrate the real 2010 federal budget deficit was $5.3 trillion, not the $1.3 trillion previously reported by the Congressional Budget Office, according to the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government as released by the U.S. Department of Treasury Feb. 26, 2010.

The difference between the $1.3 trillion “official” 2010 federal budget  deficit numbers and the $5.3 trillion budget deficit based on data reported in  the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government is that the official  budget deficit is calculated on a cash basis, where all tax receipts, including  Social Security tax receipts, are used to pay government liabilities as they  occur.

The calculations in the 2010 Financial Report are calculated on a GAAP basis  (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) that includes year-for-year changes  in the net present value of unfunded liabilities in social insurance programs  such as Social Security and Medicare.

Under cash accounting, the government makes no provision for future Social  Security and Medicare benefits in the year in which those benefits accrue.

“The broad GAAP-based federal deficits, including the Social Security and  Medicare unfunded liabilities, have been in the $4 trillion to $5 trillion range  in 2008 and 2009, and 2010’s deficit again likely was near $5 trillion,  remaining both uncontrollable and unsustainable,” Williams wrote.

“The federal government cannot cover such an annual shortfall by raising  taxes, as there are not enough untaxed wages and salaries or corporate profits  to do so,” he warned.

In his analysis of the 2010 Financial Report of the United States, Williams  listed both an official accounting and an alternative.

“The estimate of a broad 2010 GAAP-based deficit at $5 trillion is mine,” he  noted. “At issue with the published report, consistent year-to-year accounting  was not shown, with a large, one time reduction in reported 2010 Medicare  liabilities, based on overly optimistic assumptions of the impact from recently  enacted health care legislation.”

U.S. Government GAAP Accounting  Federal Budget Deficits U.S. Treasury, Financial Report of the United States,  2002-2010 (John Williams, Shadow Government Statistics, ShadowStats.com)

Williams argues the total U.S. obligations, including Social Security and  Medicare benefits to be paid in the future, have effectively placed the U.S.  government in bankruptcy, even before we take  into consideration any future and continuing social welfare obligations that may  be embedded within the Obama administration’s planned massive overhaul of health  care.

“The government cannot raise taxes high enough to bring the budget into  balance,” Williams said. “You could tax 100 percent of everyone’s income and 100  percent of corporate profits and the U.S. government would still be showing a  federal budget deficit on a GAAP accounting basis.”

Williams argues the U.S. government has condemned the U.S. dollar to “a  hyperinflationary grave” by taking on debt  obligations that will never be covered by raising taxes and/or by severely  slashing government spending that has become politically untouchable.

“Bankrupt sovereign states most commonly use the currency printing press as a  solution to not having enough money to cover  obligations,” he cautioned. “The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have  committed the system to its ultimate insolvency, through the easy politics of a  bottomless pocketbook, the servicing of big-moneyed special interests, gross  mismanagement, and a deliberate and ongoing effort to debase the U.S. currency.”

He is concerned that the Federal Reserve will supplement its current policy  of Quantitative Easing 2, or QE2, under which the Fed intends to purchase by  mid-year 2010 another $600 billion of Treasury debt with “QE3.”

“These actions (QE2 and QE3) should pummel heavily the U.S. dollar’s exchange  rate against other major currencies,” he concludes. “Looming with uncertain  timing is a panicked dollar dumping and dumping of dollar-denominated paper  assets, which remains the most likely event as a proximal trigger for the onset  of hyperinflation in the near-term.”

Williams predicts that the early stages of hyperinflation will be marked by  an accelerating upturn in consumer prices, a pattern that has already begun to  unfold in response to QE2.

“For those living in the United States, long-range strategies should look to  assure safety and survival, which from a financial standpoint means preserving  wealth and assets,” he advises.

Williams suggests that physical gold in the form of sovereign coins priced  near bullion prices remains the primary hedge in terms of preserving the  purchasing power of the dollar, as well as stronger major currencies such as the  Swiss franc, the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar.

And as totally insane as that is, it might well even be worse than that.

$61.936 trillion sounds like a lot.  And that’s the official figure for the International Monetary Fund’s estimate for U.S. indebtedness.  But the IMF is giving credibility to a figure that makes that $62 trillion seem almost manageable:

I Can Give You 200 Trillion Reasons Why We Need To Cut Government Spending NOW
By Michael Eden     March 7, 2011

Republicans are trying to get our spending under control, and Democrats are demonizing them every single step of the way.  Because Democrats are demons, and demonizing is the only thing they know how to do.

For the record, Republicans are trying to cut an amount which is basically 1/30th of Obama’s budget deficit.

News from globeandmail.com
The scary real U.S. government debt
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

NEIL REYNOLDS

Ottawa — reynolds.globe@gmail.com

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.

Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes.

“America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”

He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term. This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.

One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.

Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.

Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.

He says the U.S. cannot end its fiscal crisis by increasing taxes. He opposes further stimulus spending because it will simply increase the debt. But he does suggest reforms that would help – most of which would require a significant withering away of the state. He proposes that the government give every person an annual voucher for health care, provided that the total cost not exceed 10 per cent of GDP. (U.S. health care now consumes 16 per cent of GDP.) He suggests the replacement of all current federal taxes with a single consumption tax of 18 per cent. He calls for government-sponsored personal retirement accounts, with the government making contributions only for the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities.

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie. Here is an economist who speaks plainly, as the legendary straight-shooting film star Jimmy Stewart did for an earlier generation.

But Prof. Kotlikoff’s economic genre isn’t the Western. It’s the horror story – “and scarier,” one reviewer of his book suggests, than Stephen King.

Enron-style accounting?  From our government?  Say it aint so!!!

It’s isn’t a matter of IF America will financially collapse; it is only a matter of WHEN.  And “WHEN” is SOON.

And it will necessarily happen because Democrats are genuinely depraved.

Recklessly spending money on fools’ projects that your grandchildren will become debt slaves just trying to pay the interest on is immoral.

I can only keep begging Republicans to turn the Democrats’ demonization game back at them.  Democrats are running around on their talking points denouncing Republicans as “extremists” who want to kill poor people.

Bullcrap.

It is DEMOCRATS (I call them “Demoncrats,” for “Demonic Bureaucrats”) who want to implode America and kill tens of millions of American people by plunging this country into a great depression that will make the last one in the 1930s seem like a fun-filled day at the beach.

It’s not going to be the richest people who starve to death and die miserably in the cold.  It’s going to be all the people liberals love to say they care about – when in reality all they do is cynically manipulate them toward their own increasingly certain doom.

Don’t you dare forget that it has been LIBERALS who have been dreaming of undermining and imploding America financially since Cloward and Piven back in the 1960s.  And now we’ve got a JUST-ex SEIU official on tape plotting to send America into a financial crisis that will dwarf anything ever seen.

If you have a true death wish, and you vote Democrat, then by all means keep doing so, because they will give you the destruction and nihilism that you seek.  That’s the real meaning of Obama’s “hope and change.”

I Can Give You 200 Trillion Reasons Why We Need To Cut Government Spending NOW

Republicans are trying to get our spending under control, and Democrats are demonizing them every single step of the way.  Because Democrats are demons, and demonizing is the only thing they know how to do.

For the record, Republicans are trying to cut an amount which is basically 1/30th of Obama’s budget deficit.

News from globeandmail.com
The scary real U.S. government debt
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

NEIL REYNOLDS

Ottawa — reynolds.globe@gmail.com

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.

Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes.

“America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”

He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term. This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.

One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.

Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.

Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.

He says the U.S. cannot end its fiscal crisis by increasing taxes. He opposes further stimulus spending because it will simply increase the debt. But he does suggest reforms that would help – most of which would require a significant withering away of the state. He proposes that the government give every person an annual voucher for health care, provided that the total cost not exceed 10 per cent of GDP. (U.S. health care now consumes 16 per cent of GDP.) He suggests the replacement of all current federal taxes with a single consumption tax of 18 per cent. He calls for government-sponsored personal retirement accounts, with the government making contributions only for the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities.

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie. Here is an economist who speaks plainly, as the legendary straight-shooting film star Jimmy Stewart did for an earlier generation.

But Prof. Kotlikoff’s economic genre isn’t the Western. It’s the horror story – “and scarier,” one reviewer of his book suggests, than Stephen King.

Enron-style accounting?  From our government?  Say it aint so!!!

It’s isn’t a matter of IF America will financially collapse; it is only a matter of WHEN.  And “WHEN” is SOON.

And it will necessarily happen because Democrats are genuinely depraved.

Recklessly spending money on fools’ projects that your grandchildren will become debt slaves just trying to pay the interest on is immoral.

69% Of Independents Say Obama’s Policies Have Made Economy Worse

Democrats have been telling anyone who will listen that Republicans destroyed the economy.  And that letting Republicans take over is giving power back to the very people who drove the economy into the ditch to begin with.

But here’s the thing – only Democrats believe that load of hooey now.

People have moved on.  What they understand is that Democrats have made a bad situation far, far worse:

Sixty-nine percent of independents say Obama has made the economy worse and 80 percent of those also say they will definitely vote this year. More than 6 out of 10 also disapprove of the job Obama is doing, are angry with government and oppose the health care reform plan he advocated and signed into law.

Things were really bad the last time Republicans ran Congress.  In January of 2006 – the last time Republicans were in control – unemployment was a terrible 4.6%.  And the last time Republicans submitted a budget (for FY2007), the budget deficit was $161 billion.

Just so you know, unemployment under Obama and the Democrat-owned Congress has been more than twice what Republicans left for seventeen straight months.  The VERY NEXT YEAR after Republicans lost control of Congress, Democrats wrote a budget (FY2008) that was nearly THREE TIMES HIGHER IN DEFICIT SPENDING, with a $459 billion deficit.

Annual deficits under the last Republican Congress have become monthly deficits under the Democrats.

In 2008, during Bush’s final year in office, 40 banks closed.  Compared to 140 banks closing in Obama’s first year in office, and 125 more banks have closed in Obama’s second year, as of September 21, 2010.

Under Obama, we are now seeing the highest poverty rate in fifty years.  And more Americans are now on food stamps than ever before.

Which all goes to say that independents are right: Obama and the Democrats HAVE made the economy far worse.

Democrats tell the myth that it was Bush and Republican policies that destroyed the economy in 2008.  But Democrats were crawling all over the policies that led to our economic implosion.  It was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies that destroyed our economy – and Democrats owned Fannie and Freddie.  Democrats also claim that Bush and Republicans refused to implement regulations that would have prevented the crisis – but Bush tried MORE THAN SEVENTEEN TIMES to regulate Fannie and Freddie.  And Democrats marched in goose-step to block every single one of those attempts.

Which is to say that Democrats have been far worse than voters believed they would be, while Republicans were nowhere near as bad as a profoundly dishonest and partisan media said they were.

 

ObamaCare Already Rearing Its VERY Ugly Head

You’ve got to be amazed at the Democrats’ arrogance, incompetence, and ignorance.

They are apparently having their version of Casablanca’s Captain Renault moment: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

Only, in this Democrat-retelling, Captain Renault instead says, “Gambling?  There’s no gambling going on here!  It’s just gaming, not GAMBLING!  Why, it’s nothing more than two parties engaging in a predictive enterprise, in which the accurate prediction is rewarded in a monetary transaction.  But gambling?  You’re a violent racist to call that ‘gambling’!!!

Oh, my goodness.  I think you just spat on me!  It’s just the kind of thing you haters who attack us as “gamblers” would do!”

MARCH 27, 2010
The ObamaCare Writedowns
The corporate damage rolls in, and Democrats are shocked!

It’s been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.

This wholesale destruction of wealth and capital came with more than ample warning. Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or “political.”

Perhaps that explains why the Administration is now so touchy. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke took to the White House blog to write that while ObamaCare is great for business, “In the last few days, though, we have seen a couple of companies imply that reform will raise costs for them.” In a Thursday interview on CNBC, Mr. Locke said “for them to come out, I think is premature and irresponsible.”

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman and House Democrats announced yesterday that they will haul these companies in for an April 21 hearing because their judgment “appears to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs.”

In other words, shoot the messenger. Black-letter financial accounting rules require that corporations immediately restate their earnings to reflect the present value of their long-term health liabilities, including a higher tax burden. Should these companies have played chicken with the Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid this politically inconvenient reality? Democrats don’t like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet.

On top of AT&T’s $1 billion, the writedown wave so far includes Deere & Co., $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million; AK Steel, $31 million; 3M, $90 million; and Valero Energy, up to $20 million. Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks.

As Joe Biden might put it, this is a big, er, deal for shareholders and the economy. The consulting firm Towers Watson estimates that the total hit this year will reach nearly $14 billion, unless corporations cut retiree drug benefits when their labor contracts let them.

Meanwhile, John DiStaso of the New Hampshire Union Leader reported this week that ObamaCare could cost the Granite State’s major ski resorts as much as $1 million in fines, because they hire large numbers of seasonal workers without offering health benefits. “The choices are pretty clear, either increase prices or cut costs, which could mean hiring fewer workers next winter,” he wrote.

The Democratic political calculation with ObamaCare is the proverbial boiling frog: Gradually introduce a health-care entitlement by hiding the true costs, hook the middle class on new subsidies until they become unrepealable, but try to delay the adverse consequences and major new tax hikes so voters don’t make the connection between their policy and the economic wreckage. But their bill was such a shoddy, jerry-rigged piece of work that the damage is coming sooner than even some critics expected.

The Democrats passed their totally partisan bill (the only bipartisanship was in the “Hell no!” vote, with 34 Democrats joining every single Republican).

The New York Times reported that Obama’s core promise was his pledge that he would transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars, move beyond the divisive politics of Washington, and build a new governing majority that brought Democrats, independents and Republicans together.  And now we know that his fundamental, core promise was just a total lie, a massive lie of the devil.  Not only did he not try to become a unifying figure, as he cynically and deceitfully promised, but he became the most polarizing president in the history of the nation.  And that broken promise is now erupting into open rage like we have never seen in this country.

Obama is trying to demonize Republicans for the anger, but HE WAS THE ONE WHO PROMISED TO BE A TRANSCENDENT FIGURE.  HE WAS THE ONE WHO LIED.

Democrats have obfuscated every fact with spin and lies, and every single truth teller they could not bribe or intimidate they have tried to destroy.

Democrats can pass a pile of stinking lies on a 100% partisan ideological vote, but what they can’t do is make that pile of stinking lies that comprise ObamaCare actually work.  The Democrats health care law is already an open disaster, and it will continue to grow into a bigger and bigger disaster no matter how many congressional kangaroo courts they hold to demonize businesses who reported that their costs will skyrocket under this evil bill.

Obama said if you liked your health care you could keep it.  ABC was reporting that that promise was questionable back in July of last year.  Now it is a proven lie.  It was just another whopping lie of the devil all along.  Businesses are taking hits in the millions and even in the billions of dollars.  And one of them after another is going to start dumping their retirees into Medicare as the cost of offering private insurance plans soar under ObamaCare.

Obama’s reckeless spending is simply staggering.  The CBO is reporting that it is a gigantic $1.2 TRILLION more than Obama said it would be.  And they are reporting the terrifying news that the federal debt will soar to 90% of Gross Domestic Product.

Business costs are soaring.  AT & T will take a billion dollar hit because of ObamaCare.

As bad as that is in dollars, the bigger hit may well be the one taken by Caterpillar, because it shows the abject hypocrisy and fraud of ObamaCare.  Last year Obama said that “you can measure America’s bottom line by looking at Caterpillar’s bottom line.” And now that same Caterpillar is taking a $100 million hit due to ObamaCare.  Now that same Caterpillar is saying, “From our point of view, a tax increase like this cannot come at a worse time.”

That means fewer jobs for Americans.  A LOT fewer jobs.  And no denials by our Democrat version of Captain Renault can change that with his sputtering denials.

And there are other hidden provisions that are starting to leap out of this bill that Democrats passed, but apparently never bothered to read.

Now we’re finding that Americans are going to take a hit as high as $2,000 under another dark tunnel provision in ObamaCare.

“The damage is coming sooner than expected.”

That’s the nutshell summary of ObamaCare.

CBO Totally Off Projecting Social Security Meltdown

The Congressional Budget Office has a 100% track record: they always underestimate how much government programs cost; and they always fail to project how soon they will go to hell.

It is ironically fitting that we have the news that Social Security is going into the red way ahead of schedule the same week that we pass a law based on a massively erroneous CBO projection.

From the New York Times:

This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Okay.  The CBO was off by a whopping six years.

And we’re supposed to trust the accuracy of their bogus politicized “score” of ObamaCare why?

The New York Times goes on to say:

Mr. Goss said Social Security’s annual report last year projected revenue would more than cover payouts until at least 2016 because economists expected a quicker, stronger recovery from the crisis. Officials foresaw an average unemployment rate of 8.2 percent in 2009 and 8.8 percent this year, though unemployment is hovering at nearly 10 percent.

The trustees did foresee, in late 2008, that the recession would be severe enough to deplete Social Security’s funds more quickly than previously projected. They moved the year of reckoning forward, to 2037 from 2041. Mr. Goss declined to reveal the contents of the forthcoming annual report, but said people should not expect the date to lurch forward again.

Do you get that?  The report that said everything would be just peachy dandy until 2016 was just written LAST YEAR.

These people don’t have a freaking clue.  And that is simply a fact.

You were sold a bill of lies packaged under the rhetoric, “Ten years from now, ObamaCare will only cost X, Y, and Z.”

These people don’t know what the hell will happen next week, let alone next decade.

The math necessary to justify the proposition that ObamaCare would cover 30 million more people and run in a deficit neutral fashion rather reminds me of a Sidney Harris cartoon:

All I can tell you is the Democrats’ math wasn’t even explicit in step one.

There were so many gimmicks, shenanigans, and outright lies in the legislation they sent to the CBO for scoring that it isn’t even funny.

This bill will boomerang back at us in the coming years and it will bankrupt the country.  We’ve had wildly wrong budget projections in the form of analysis justifying Social Security and Medicare.  And now we’ve got $100 trillion debt in unfunded liabilities to show for those totally bogus projections.  We’ve managed to weather the massive red ink deficits in those programs until now, but there’s a fundamental difference with ObamaCare.  That difference is A) that we’re stacking ObamaCare on top of those massive liabilities and compounding trillions on top of trillions; and B) that the economy is in FAR worse shape than it was than when these massive programs went off the rails.

79% of Americans see a complete economic collapse coming.  They’re right.  Get ready for it.  Because the beast is coming.

Update, March 26: Today we have this news as reported in the Washington Times:

CBO report: Debt will rise to 90% of GDP
Friday, March 26, 2010
By David M. Dickson

President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

In its 2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president’s budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade.

Only a total fool would trust the government’s ability to do anything other than massively underestimate its debts.

The problem is that fools from the party of fools are in power.

Obama Sets Record With Biggest Deficit In History

The left told us that Obama’s was a historic presidency.  And they were right: he just smashed his own record for massive and totally unsustainable deficits.

Budget deficit sets record in February
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER (AP)

WASHINGTON — The government ran up the largest monthly deficit in history in February, keeping the flood of red ink on track to top last year’s record for the full year.

The Treasury Department said Wednesday that the February deficit totaled $220.9 billion, 14 percent higher than the previous record set in February of last year.

The deficit through the first five months of this budget year totals $651.6 billion, 10.5 percent higher than a year ago.

The Obama administration is projecting that the deficit for the 2010 budget year will hit an all-time high of $1.56 trillion, surpassing last year’s $1.4 trillion total. The administration is forecasting that the deficit will remain above $1 trillion in 2011, giving the country three straight years of $1 trillion-plus deficits.

The administration says the huge deficits are necessary to get the country out of the deepest recession since the 1930s. But Republicans have attacked the stimulus spending as wasteful and a failure at the primary objective of lowering unemployment.  [Editorial note: The Republicans are right, and the American people know it.  The stimulus is a gigantic porker which was recently upgraded as costing a massive $862 billion from the previous estimate of $787 billion.  But the real cost is actually $3.27 TRILLION!!! And contrary to Obama’s utterly false claims, only SIX PERCENT of Americans believe that the stimulus has created any jobs at all].

The administration defends the economic stimulus bill that Congress passed in February 2009 with a pricetag at the time of $787 billion as the right medicine to get the economy back on its feet. President Barack Obama has said even more is needed to battle an unemployment rate that remained stuck in February at 9.7 percent.  [Editorial note: When Obama was elected, unemployment was at 6.6%.  He promised that his stimulus would prevent unemployment from reaching 8%.  The stimulus failed by Obama’s own standard.  To try to explain away the failure of his policy, Obama created the nonexistent category of “saved jobs.”  But economists point out the following: “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called `jobs saved.’ It doesn’t exist…”]

The White House says that job creation will remain a top priority, hoping to convince voters that Obama did not spend too much time during his first year in office trying to get Congress to pass health care reform.  [Allow me to editorially interrupt this spin to point out that ObamaCare is the top priority, with Obama hoping to convince liberals that they need to pass this incredibly unpopular bill no matter how many Democrats lose their seats in order to “maintain a strong presidency.”  And in point of fact, they have done little else this entire year].

The government’s monthly budget report showed the record $220.9 billion deficit for February reflected outlays of $328.4 billion and revenues of $107.5 billion. The February receipts marked the first time that revenues are up compared with the same month a year ago since April 2008. Revenues had fallen for 21 straight months as the recession cut into both individual and corporate income tax payments.  [Editorials note: And yet Obama is selling his healthcare takeover as “deficit neutral” on the incredibly risky assumption that tax revenues will miraculously massively increase.  So Obama is explaining away his deficits by pointing to the frighteningly low revenues even as he bases his health care on the assumption that those same revenues will massively increase.  And if Obama is wrong, the trillions of dollars of new spending will implode our economy].

Deficits normally shoot up in February because it is a month when the government makes large refund payments to individuals and corporations as part of the tax filing process. Those payments were boosted this year by various tax credits that were expanded or added as part of the government’s stimulus efforts including the “Making Work Pay” tax credit and the first-time home buyers tax credit. [Editorial note: Which doesn’t in any way change the fact that this February’s frighteningly low revenues continues a 21-consecutive month trend.  That in addition to the fact that the stimulus is contributing to our deficit crisis].

Through the first five months of the budget year, government revenues totaled $800.5 billion, down 7 percent from a year ago, while outlays totaled $1.45 trillion, up a slight 0.1 percent from a year ago.

The deficit of $651.6 billion through February is up by 10.5 percent from the $589.8 billion deficit run up during the first five months of the 2009 budget year. The government’s budget year begins on Oct. 1.

The budget that Obama sent to Congress in February projects that the deficits over the next decade will total $8.53 trillion. But the Congressional Budget Office last week put the 10-year total even higher at $9.8 trillion. Part of the reason for the $1.2 trillion difference is that the CBO is projecting slower economic growth and thus less tax revenues than the administration over the next decade.  [Editorial note: Number one, this proves we can’t trust the Obama administration or the government’s cost estimates to do anything other than be lowball figures.  Number two, passing trillions in new spending via ObamaCare is hardly the thing to do given the fact that we will have LOWER revenues rather than higher ones].

The administration has maintained that the country must run large budget deficits until the economy has begun to grow at a sustainable pace that is bringing the unemployment rate down. Only then, the administration says, should the government focus on getting control of the deficits.  [Editorial note: So I’m flat broke and deeply in debt.  Clearly the thing I need to do is go on a massive spending spree on my credit card in order to get out of debt!!!].

Obama has created by executive order an 18-member fiscal reform commission that has been charged with coming up with a plan to shrink the deficit to 3 percent of the economy within five years. The plan is scheduled to be unveiled in December, after the midterm congressional elections.  [Editorial note: What Obama has in fact created is a tool to weasel out of his repeated campaign promise not to raise taxes on “95% of Americans” by so much “as one dime”].

With the economy so weak, the interest rates that the government has to finance the flood of red ink have remained low. However, economists are worried that the favorable outlook on interest rates could change quickly if investors, including foreign investors, start to worry about the government’s commitment to restraining future deficits. China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities.  [Editorial note: First of all, the Associated Press is factually wrong: Japan is now our largest holder, as China is jumping off the proverbial sinking ship.  And to make things even worse, China is preparing to abandon the dollar altogether.  Second, just to clarify, what this paragraph means is that the moment our interest rates go up – which they have to do in order to deal with our debt/deficits – we will have a double-dip recession.  And the second dip may well be worst than the first].

Through the first five months of this budget year, net interest payments totaled $86.5 billion, up 15.3 percent from a year ago.  [Editorial note: this is exactly what happened to Greece; and we are not far away from the same sort of implosion occurring here.  Obama’s “solution” is to borrow more money in more unsustainable spending which will ultimately push our interest payments rates up and up].

In its report last week, the CBO predicted that the government debt held by investors would climb from $7.5 trillion at the end of last year to $20.3 trillion in 2020. CBO forecast that interest payments would more than quadruple from a projected $209 billion this year to $916 billion annually by the end of the decade.  [Editorial note: So let’s just keep spending and spending and spending until we fly off a cliff to our deaths].

Congratulations on your historic presidency, Mr. Obama.  Congratulations on your new record as the biggest spender in the history of the human race.

Obama promised hope and change.  And he’s delivering.

A second Great Depression will be “change.”  And there are plenty on the left – who embrace the Cloward-Piven strategy – who are “hoping” for it.

Katie Couric Rips Obama In What Newsmax Describes As ‘A Turning Point’

Can someone give me an “Amen”?

Or maybe you can figure out how to sing the following story to the tune of “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz.

Turning Point: Couric Rips Obama

Sunday, November 29, 2009
By: Special From Newsmax’ Most Informed Sources

Katie Couric may be best known for her unflattering interview with Sarah Palin. But her nightly news broadcast this past Monday night may be an indicator that the big liberal media are now turning their guns on Obama.

Couric said on “CBS Evening News” that Americans are growing “disenchanted” with Obama and are openly questioning his credibility.

“Is the honeymoon over?” anchor Couric said at the beginning of her correspondent’s report.

[Couric went on to say]:

“Although President Obama has been in office less than a year, many Americans are growing disenchanted with his handling of the enormous problems he and the country are facing, from healthcare to unemployment to Afghanistan.

“His poll numbers are sliding, and at least one poll shows his job approval rating has fallen, for the first time, below 50 percent.”

Correspondent Chris Reid chimed in: “The president is getting battered on everything from the economy to foreign policy.  Some polls show Americans are increasingly questioning his credibility.”

The report asserted that while Obama talks about dealing with unemployment, which is over 10 percent and expected to rise, he has developed “no new ideas” for dealing with the problem.

CBS also cited a poll showing that only 14 percent of Americans believe Obama’s claim that healthcare reform won’t add to the budget deficit, and only 7 percent believe that the stimulus has created any jobs at all.

The report also criticized the president for being “indecisive” on Afghanistan, and for returning from his recent Asian trip “with little to show for it.”

An expert was quoted as describing his trip as the “amateur hour,” as he did not line up agreements with foreign countries before venturing abroad.

You can just see a despairing Obama saying, “If I’ve lost Couric, I’ve lost snooty America.”

I’d pretty much put it this way:

Spot the fake poser in the following photo:

And, of course, your instantaneously supposed to form the conclusion, “Hey wait a minute: they’re both fake posers!”

My brother sent me a picture that illustrates this verity:

You see, in many ways, Michaele Salahi is a doppelganger for Barack Obama.  Because just as the White house is now growing “disenchanted” with the former guest whom they foolishly let in to a state dinner, the country is now growing “disenchanted” with the man they foolishly elected to the aforementioned White House.

But I shouldn’t complain overly much: at least Barry didn’t bow down to her.

In a rare moment of poetic justice, Katie Couric – who was so late to the game in even allowing any hint to come out of her in-the-tank network that the president she helped elect is a dishonest fraud and poser who doesn’t know the difference between the economy and the giant hole in the ground that he’s burying it in (whew!) – also posed with the same fake poser:

The big difference here is that Katie Couric – with all of her impressive “journalist” skills – has probably figured out that Michaele Salahi was a fake and a poser a lot faster than she figured it out about Barack Obama.

The mainstream media will be dragged kicking and screaming to the truth and to fair and honest reporting.  And the only reason they are beginning to tell the truth about what a loser Barack Obama is as a president is the fact that their viewers already realize that Obama is a loser, and will start leaving their networks in droves unless the “journalists” at least occasionally report the truth.

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.