I’m relatively new to Twitter, so I’m still learning the ropes, but it’s fun to see how fast information can flow in the Twittersphere. Today I was stopped by something David Limbaugh “tweeted”: “Why can’t the media say to Obama: You mean 2 tell us you’re not even going 2 try to get the deficit and debt under control in a second term?”
The budget President Obama released this week is apparently a curious document, which virtually no one expects to pass, if it gets the opportunity for a vote in Congress at all. One surprising thing, to which Limbaugh was alluding, is that it makes no pretense of spending reduction to reduce the deficit or the debt. The conventional wisdom has been that the upcoming presidential election is all about the economy. If so, why this budget?
I see two possibilities (but there could be more). First it could be that Obama is such a died-in-the-wool socialist that he just can’t help himself and the only course open to him ideologically is the path to total statism, with the government running everything, collecting all the money and paying all the people who are the government’s employees and subjects (read serfs), even though such naked socialism could cause him to lose reelection. That does seem to be his vision for us, the humble peasants in Obama’s America.
The other possibility is just slightly different, with the result being the same: descent into statism and a gray existence in a socialist “utopia”. The difference with the second possibility is that Obama knows full well that this course isn’t going to be popular with large numbers of people, but they are outnumbered by the people who will embrace free contraception, free abortions, free antibiotics, free… well most everything. Not enough people are appalled by deficits north of a trillion dollars as far as the eye can see to defeat him in November.
Perhaps, as Obama has watched the Republican primaries with the innumerable debates, he believes that no candidate can effectively make a free market capitalist argument that is a match for good-old, red-meat class envy and that, since a”1-percenter” like Romney is the favorite stereotype that Hollywood and the Mainstream Media loves to pillory everyday, he won’t present much of a challenge.
At a time when 15% of Americans are on food stamps and 18% get some type of government check, NOT COUNTING government employees, and almost half of the population pays no income tax at all, voices calling for reductions in spending and promoting personal responsibility are drowned out by the clueless, raw-throated Occupiers, who have no idea how an economy works or how wealth is created. They have been convinced that they should be able to take whatever they want.
To Leftists, large numbers on the government dole is a victory. To me it is a scandal. In this the greatest country the world has ever seen, do we really believe that 15% of the population cannot even feed themselves without government assistance?
Also this week, we saw escalating violence in Greece. Is that where we will be in five years; or two, as the money runs out? The alarming deficits are only part of the story. Obviously, the interest rates the government pays on the money it borrows will go up as the government finds it more and more difficult to pay the money back and its credit rating is downgraded. As it is, 40% of each dollar the government receives already has to go to paying interest on the debt.
If the interest rate doubles…
