Obama is amazing, a miracle worker in fact. So much so that he has decreed an end to arithmetic. No way can he spend a trillion here and a trillion there without it adding up. But the O administration is not very good at addition. Or subtraction. With all those trillions and trillions, pretty soon you’re talking real money.
Where you gonna get the money?
From smoke and mirrors.
Acording to Doug Holtz-Eakin, you claim a two trillion dollar savings on cutting down Afghanistan expenses to $50 billion per year, even though you’ve just sent another 20,000 troops over there and things are getting pretty freaky in Pakistan, where the Taliban are now within 60 miles of the capital and the pathetic Pakistani military has sent over 2 percent of its whole big army to fight them. Because the Pakistani military is hopelessly penetrated with Islamist radicals, they don’t want to win. They want to squeeze the West for blackmail money.
So where are the $50 billion savings going to come from? Do you want the Taliban with Pakistani nukes, even just dirty nukes?
Holz-Eakin also points out that Obama can claim to make oodles of tax money from “cap and trade” on carbon emissions by industry. Cap and trade is of course a scheme for capping and taxing. First you tell people they are only allowed so many car trips and so much you can exhale (produces CO2) per year, but they can trade credits for carbon production by buying carbon credits from your local truck company — providing they don’t run their trucks. The government both limits carbon emissions and taxes you on them, except that India and China are pumping out carbon from all their new smokestack industries, radically increasingly worldwide carbon emissions. But they are not doing this cap and trade stuff since they don’t want to torpedo their new-found prosperity.
If all that sounds crazy, well … duuhhhh.
So those are the supposed sources of income.
How about the expenditure side?
Would you consider a $3.6 trillion dollar federal budget about right? That’s about at third of our gross domestic product. Earlier this month we heard about all the painful budget cuts proposed by the president. Like $17 billion worth. Let’s see, 3.6 trillion minus 17 billion gives us 3.583 trillion. Now the Democrats hate those “budget cuts” of $17 billion, so they might never happen.
I wonder: Can we get a loan from the Saudis, just to tide us over? Or China? Or my brother-in-law? Or Obama’s family in Kenya?
Add to that revolutionary health care reforms for all Americans which are advertised as saving us money. But this would be prancing on deep water indeed. It would be the very first Washington welfare program to give free goodies to everybody in the country and still end up saving money. The upfront costs alone would be 1.2 to 1.5 trillion bucks over the first ten years.
Sounds like magic, doesn’t it?
So what about a “peace dividend” from ending the WOT — now called “overseas contingency operations”? Well, the Taliban are conquering a good chunk of Pakistan. They have their eyes on Afghanistan again. And they used to shelter al-Qaeda terrorists who tried to attack the United States and succeeded twice — once in 1993 and again on 9/11/01. They have tried many times since then, but only killed lots of people in Madrid, Bali, Mumbai, and Iraq. Speaking of Iraq, the violence level is going up there, not down. Can we really withdraw troops if Iraq is going to fall apart, with a good chunk going to Ahmadinejad next door?
So much for the “peace dividend.”
Oh, and that doesn’t count the TARP money, say a round trillion plus given interest costs on all that money. And now we hear that the banks in trouble will need another 600 billion or so, which is actually more, because they’ve switched to a more optimistic accounting scheme. Say two trillion on TARP to save the banking system.
Don’t forget the car companies going bankrupt. Don’t forget the higher unemployment rate. All that means less for the Treasury, because taxes depend on the health of the economy. Poor economy, lower tax receipts.
Don’t forget the states, like California, that are now demanding money from the Feds. And don’t forget all of our “green investments.” Like the hydrogen economy Governor Arnie was promising California last year, but which now seems pretty far-fetched. California is famously going broke, and the taxpayers are not in the mood to finance Sacramento’s wild spending spree with even more of their dough.
And don’t forget that we are prohibited from using our own resources to find oil to keep the cars and factories humming. Or building safe nuclear power plants. Or developing shale into oil. Or drilling offshore.
Where will we find the money? We’ll print it. After all, that’s the new version of Keynesian economics. During a downturn you’re supposed to have deficit spending to goose the economy. John Maynard Keynes, where are you now that we need some common sense?
My liberal friends don’t worry about it. They know Obama is a Lightworker. He will take care of us.
Just close your eyes and enjoy the ride. And if you lose your job, or your 401(k), or your social security, or your house … it’s all gonna be all right. The government will take care of you.
Or will it?
Are we waltzing on the Titanic, or what?
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