The Magic Money Machine - Committing Econocide
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WASHINGTON - 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.
Yet even before he can point to a law meant to boost the economy or to post-stimulus efforts to rein in budget deficits, he has to deal with the fallout of the Congressional Budget Office's forecast that the current year's deficit will jump from last year's $455 billion to a record $1.2 trillion.
"There's a sticker shock problem," said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Minnesota and the author of a book on budget politics. "This is a new problem for Obama: How far out there are people willing to go?" Kaching
As a percentage of Gross Domestic Product - all the goods and services produced - the coming deficit will be almost three times more than in World War II. Granted, WWII was the only thing that saved us from FDR's New Deal and over a decade of the Great Depression, but the will - the focus - the national sense of urgency is not there for the grandiose schemes of the Left. What we'll wind up with is a mish mash of pet projects, political pork and ballooning bureaucracy. Throwing money at our problems will not solve them, didn't work for FDR and it will not work for BHO. There is only one thing that will drive our economic engines and push our productivity hard enough to turn this situation around. Only one thing will bring us all together and concentrate our efforts with the laser-like focus this country requires now. Only one single thing. We need a great big war.
Wow, where to start...
Canada for the resources.
Mexico for the resources and labor.
Heck, let's just go all the way to Panama.
But maybe we'll get lucky and Iran will get hinky.
Posted by: Uncle Fester | 01/08/2009 at 09:14 PM
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.
"Harder"? That's a relative term. Let the Democrat Party propaganda outlets (the MSM) get their machinery into high gear and then we'll see what happens. Remember, while Bush was in office, deficits, increasing deficits, all that stuff was bad, BAD, BAD, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Now, expect to hear things along the lines that Obama's deficit spending plan is needed medicine, or some crap like that.
Posted by: Bomb-a-rama | 01/09/2009 at 02:38 PM