It's the President, Stupid
By John Ransom
TownHall.com
Our Demander-in-Chief has once again put together
a budget so mind boggling stupid, so bereft of
credibility that it will spontaneously abort
somewhere between the White House and the desk of
Senator Harry Reid (D-Who Me?).
You can think of Obama’s newest budget as the
“legitimate rape” of America.
All you really need to know about the budget is this
headline from the Washington Post’s
Wonk Blog: “Obama budget seeks new spending, new
taxes to boost economy, tame debt”.
Ha, ha, ha. Stop me if you heard that one before.
If we gave the government a buck for every time we
heard THAT one, we’d have a $17.5 trillion dollar
deficit. Oh, wait….
Calorie free spending? In one great soda? Who
could be against that?
Democrats and Republicans, that’s who should be.
This might be one of those Obama joke-shop budgets
that once again get zero votes in Congress.
It is, after all, an election year. And that might
be the point of the budget.
The House could go 435 to zip against it, and I
doubt very much Harry Reid (D-Where’d I Leave My
Pen?) will even let it get to the Senate floor.
And then Democrats in the House can say they voted
against more spending and more taxes. And Democrats
in the Senate can make up whatever lie they think
will wash in Peoria.
But so what? The damage has already been done by
Obama’s de facto budgets.
Because today we have
$251 billion
dollars in interest payments on our national
debt, at a time when interest rates are at all-time
lows. That’s about the size of the defense spending
for China and Russia combined. That’s more than the
defense spending for the next
top four countries combined.
Currently the interest rate on the benchmark
ten-year Treasury Note is 2.71 percent. The
Congressional Budget Office says that they think by
2018 the interest rate on the ten year Treasury
Notes will be at 5 percent.
That affects interest payments on the national debt.
“Net interest payments by the federal government
are also projected to grow rapidly,” says
the
CBO, “climbing from 1.3 percent of GDP in 2014
to 3.3 percent in 2024, mostly because of the return
of interest rates to more typical levels,” as we see
in the Treasury note market.
If that’s true, then after Social Security and
Obamacare, interest on the national debt will be the
single biggest line item on the budget, near $600
billion or more—depending on how much the economy
grows-- and that’s more than the defense spending
for the top eight countries-- after the United
States-- combined.
That’s $8,000 dollars worth of interest payments for
a family of four… every, single year.
And what will we have to show for it?
Nothing.
At least during World War II we liberated a few
countries along the way.
Today, not only can’t we free ourselves form the
cycle of debt, we can’t even protect the Ukraine
from a country that spends 15 percent of what we do
on national defense. While we fly technically
sophisticated drones, Russia has soldiers who march
to battle in tennis shoes.
We can’t even build the Keystone Pipeline, the
biggest no-brainer decision in the history of
Obama’s presidency-- which the president has gotten
wrong every single time.
What is this?
Like the sixth time he’s not been able to make up
his mind about building a pipeline for oil that’s
already traveling on freight cars far more
dangerously?
Obama came to Washington as a supposed outsider who
would change the way Washington works.
Not only has he failed to do that, he become the
epitome of the Washington insider, cutting special
interest deals, proposing budgets and passing the
buck on private sector job creation all in the name
of squalid politics.
Well there’s an election year now, and politics will
get more squalid, so I’d like to remind Obama’s
enablers on both the right and the left: It’s the
president, stupid.
Or better yet, it’s the stupid president.
Be warned.