Comedy And Tragedy
Is anybody keeping score?
The day after the new president worked the halls of congress like a veteran standup comedian working at the Improv, the Democrat controlled House of Representatives passed an additional earmark riddled spending bill totaling $410 billion.
This move is absolutely beyond comprehension. Having just signed away $787 billion of our great-grandchildren’s money this additional spending will bring this insane spending spree total to just shy of $1.2 trillion dollars. And they haven’t even begun looking at the regular budget yet.
The passage of this bill demonstrates the absurd insincerity of President Obama’s so called fiscal responsibility summit and the committees he has put into place to monitor spending. It also calls into question both his sincerity and sanity in alleging that he will be able to cut the federal deficit in half within his first four years, as this new spending totals more than the original deficit.
After falsely claiming that he was able to persuade lawmakers to keep earmarks out of the so called stimulus bill, Obama made no such publicity stunt on this first non-emergency spending measure of his presidency. The result was that lawmakers claimed billions in federal funds for pet projects with a total of 8,570 earmarks.
While Obama makes sure that banks and financial institutions cut the pay and benefits of their directors, and congress questions whether or not Wall Street CEO’s are using the self-service pumps to fill their American made hybrids, this new legislation provides increases of roughly 8 percent for the federal agencies it covers or about $32 billion more than last year.
Among just some of the more than 8,000 new earmarks are a quarter if a million dollars for a “tattoo removal violence outreach program”. You simply can’t make stuff like that up. There are also nearly a dozen earmarks aimed at giving money to clients of the PMA Group, a lobbying company now at the center of a federal corruption investigation. Federal prosecutors are investigating PMA Group’s founder and president, Paul Magliochetti, who is a former top aide to Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., and Chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds defense programs. The company’s offices were raided earlier in February and PMA Group has announced plans to disband by the end of the month.
As the country spirals into the depths of the worst recession since World War II this new legislation is estimated to grow the size of government by 8.3 percent. The problem is that the family budget which has to pay for the federal budget only grew at 1.3 percent last year, and that was before the real depths of the recession took hold.
Once again Democrats are trying to pin the blame on Republicans for the current economic troubles, but anyone that bothers to look at reality will see that it was a Democrat controlled congress in the last two years of the Bush presidency that led the way for the times we face today. Bush can certainly be held accountable for not vetoing their spending but he can’t be blamed for causing it.
With the ever increasing debt load this country is incurring I doubt we will have to worry about foreign investors making waves in the Treasury bill market. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said yesterday that he believes this economic recession will be over by year’s end. That statement however was based on a Bush era budget deficit. With the Democrats now raising the debt ceiling by over 300% in just the first month of the administration of change I doubt Bernanke or anybody else has the slightest idea of the devastation this overspending will cause.
Republicans are beseeching the president to veto this new spending package and live up to his claim of cutting out earmarks from the congressional landscape.
When it comes to his promises let’s see if this president is a stand up guy or just a standup comedian.
