Obama is showing his extreme Leftist colors. One area he is showing his colors is his budget and commerce killing policies. This is 3-times larger than Bush's largest deficit, by the way. All we heard was how much Bush put us in debt every year... ... hello?!
Obama's Radicalism Is Killing the Dow
A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism.
By MICHAEL J. BOSKIN
It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.
The illusion that Barack Obama will lead from the economic center has quickly come to an end. Instead of combining the best policies of past Democratic presidents -- John Kennedy on taxes, Bill Clinton on welfare reform and a balanced budget, for instance -- President Obama is returning to Jimmy Carter's higher taxes and Mr. Clinton's draconian defense drawdown.
Mr. Obama's $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents -- from George Washington to George W. Bush -- combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs....
Obama Will Swell Deficit More Than Bush
by Michael Medved
Attacks on the Bush economic record generally focus on his deficit spending, converting Bill Clinton’s surplus to an ocean of red ink. In truth, the average Bush deficit during eight years as President amounted to 2.7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product—slightly better than the 45-year-average deficit of 2.9 percent, going back to President Kennedy.
As Bush pointed out in his last press conference, he came in with a recession already underway and left office with a new recession just getting started, but in between the nation saw 52 consecutive months of job growth. If Congress backs a huge new stimulus program, Obama’s first year will double, triple or even or even quadruple as a percentage of GDP, but it’s unlikely the Obama-infatuated media will blame him for this scary imbalance in the federal budget.
In the first seven fiscal years overseen by the high-spending President Bush, the annual federal budget deficits were truly obscene. Yet, they never exceeded $500 billion.
In fiscal 2002 through 2008, according to the historical tables published by the Office of Management and Budget last fall, the annual deficits were $157.7 billion, $377.5 billion, $412.7 billion, $318.3 billion, $248.1 billion, $162 billion and $410 billion. (The Congressional Budget Office has since calculated that the fiscal 2008 deficit actually ended up being $454.8 billion.)
President Obama said Monday that his "administration has inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit" for fiscal 2009.
The extraordinary size of that deficit is due, of course, to what one would have hoped were passing circumstances and one-time policies: a recession, a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry and that part of the $787 billion "stimulus" President Obama signed last week that will actually be spent in this fiscal year.
"And that's why today I'm pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office," President Obama said at his summit.
But what does that mean? The administration says President Obama's promise to "cut the deficit we inherited in half" means he will reduce it from $1.3 trillion in fiscal 2009 to $533 billion in fiscal 2013.
This $533 billion deficit -- that President Obama vows will be the lowest annual deficit he runs in any of the next four years -- is larger than any deficit the profligate President Bush ran before this recessionary year.
In fact, President Obama's planned $533 billion deficit for fiscal 2013 is more than twice as large as the $248.1 billion deficit Bush ran in 2006 and more than three times as large as the $162 billion deficit Bush ran in 2007....
... On top of this, President Obama has just promised to add more than $2 trillion to the national debt over the next four years.
To expand on a metaphor I used in a previous column, America is heading down the blind alley of big government toward the brick wall of national bankruptcy -- and President Obama is now putting his foot on the accelerator.
What's next: Liberals will use the coming crash as an argument for even more big government, quite possibly in the form of socialized medicine that seeks to control government spending by rationing the health care of all Americans.
