By a vote of 214-210, the House on Thursday passed a budget blueprint that pushes total spending on government agencies above $1 trillion -- yes, that's a "t," folks -- for the first time in the nation's history.
The budget includes a major tax hike -- it assumes many of the Bush tax cuts will not be renewed -- and would allow the alternative minimum tax to hammer millions of middle-class taxpayers.
The proposal also does absolutely nothing to address the soaring costs of federal entitlements, which threaten to eventually bankrupt the country.
This lies in stark apposition to the soaring rhetoric of Democratic Party nominee Barak Obama. As he spoke in Minneapolis, MN, in celebration of his nomination to run for President, he promised us that the Sugar Plum Fairy would sprinkle magic dust the day he was inaugurated. George Will relates some of his more amusing guarantees.
"I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick …" Obama proclaims as Florence Nightingale turns 180’s in her grave.
"this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal …"
That flat temperature curve since 1997 has no meaning. Nor does the fact that temperatures raised more in the part of the 20th Century that preceded the rise of American Industry to its apex punch any logical holes in the concept that large reductions in CO2 from US industries alone will solve the issue. Obama just sprinkles the big-government fairy dust and the planet magically heals.
Away from the happy rhetoric, athwart the elegant oratory, these halcyon promises require extraordinary remuneration to reach fruition. This sausage gets made in the House of Representatives. Here, the expenditures get detailed and shoveled into accounts. Here these accounts require funding lines. Here these funding lines require a source. The dollars have to be expropriated from somebody before they can be shoveled down a money-pit like Lieberman-Warner.
People from both parties in Congress take one look at a budget like the one the Democrats just passed and want to gag at the sheer immensity and illogic. Then the earmarks come into play. According to Mary Poppins, “just a spoon of sugar helps the medicine go down.”
However, Nancy Pelosi hasn’t been stopping at just one spoon. According to the AP, she has to hand out over $15 Billion in bribes this year to pass even a portion of her agenda.
More than 11,000 of those "earmarks," worth nearly $15 billion in all, were slipped into legislation telling the government where to spend taxpayers' money this year, keeping the issue at the center of Washington's culture of money, influence and politics.
Even our living avatar of hope and change knows that this sordid process of Federal over-expansion and rancid civic corruption drives the wheels of his favored machinery for social engineering. The AP describes one of Barak Obama’s porkapeloozas below.
Anti-pork watchdogs, for example, point to the $1.8 million in five earmarks for Chicago's Shedd Aquarium, which ran $8 million in the black last year and has embarked on a four-year, $100 million fundraising campaign. With that kind of money, why should taxpayers fund a $400,000 program earmarked by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to help the aquarium conduct a program aimed at preventing juvenile delinquency, watchdog groups ask.
Gone are the halcyon days when a motivated and caring set of parents bore the responsibility for preventing juvenile delinquency. As snide as the sentence above may have been, it also cuts to the quick of our problem. Citizens have become conditioned to have government do it for them, but have been utterly oblivious to the fact that this costs money.
Barak Obama is perfectly happy to keep us fat, dumb and happy. If he can just make sure the idiots get their earmarks, they will never wake up and ask why they need them in order to survive.
This is the year 2008; a President gets, at most, two terms in office. The slow-motion train wreck involving Social Security doesn’t even start until 2017. The grass-hoppers have no need to pay these silly things any mind. Judging from the budget that just passed the House of Representatives, they don’t intend to either.
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