Obama Loses Sleep Over Deficit Spending

I found this article from the Washington Post June 16 particularly interesting because I don't see the President's actions matching what he's saying in the story. The Post reported in its piece that President Obama stays awake nights worrying about the country's finances and that he believes the United States needs to plan now to deal with rising deficits. I couldn't agree more, but the President and I have very different ideas about how we should tackle the out of control spending orgy that is taking place in Washington.

Here's the specific quote from the story that presents a problem for me: President Obama says, "There's no doubt that we've got a serious problem in terms of our long-term deficits and debt. I make no apologies for having acted short term to deal with our recession." My chief gripe is that his spending plans aren't limited to the short term and that his 10-year budget projection will result in a doubling of the current national debt.

The President then goes on, the article says, to say that once the current recession is over, "we're going to have to close that gap between the amount of money coming in and the amount of money going out." This is key, folks. This is where the tax increases are coming, and not just for the wealthiest Americans. The wealthiest among us cannot fund all of the spending in the President's budget plan, which is why Obama is looking now at reducing Medicare and Medicaid payments to health providers, taxing health benefits, increasing so-called sin taxes, taxing the use of business cell phones for personal calls, etc. His spending is already laid out and it's unlikely to change. Therefore, in order to "close the gap" between revenues and expenditures, there's only one option: raise more money-and that's where the taxes will go up-on all of us.

More from the story: "Economists advising the American Bankers Association forecast earlier on Tuesday that the U.S. unemployment rate would peak at 10 percent, although they did not expect it to reach that mark until early in 2010."

Wait a minute. Weren't we told when the stimulus was being passed that the President's package would keep unemployment at no more than 8 percent? That's what his economic models said. But it's already at 9.4% and projected to hit 10%? What are we spending all that money for?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/16/AR2009061602610_pf.html