Kowabunga

Who’s Driving the car over the cliff?

It’s amazing what a difference 20 months makes on the political scene. For the eight years of the Bush Administration, we heard an unending scream condemning deficit spending by the Left and how it was eating away our children’s future. Yes, Bush, with the help of a Democrat controlled Congress, spent a lot of money. More than any single president when adjusted for inflation, with the exception of FDR, who had WW2 to pay for, and maybe Ronald Reagan, who was rebuilding our military and bringing down the Soviet Empire. And, except for Obama, who is doing his best to ruin America by spending our way into a new Great Depression.

Numbers do not lie.

The highest the budget deficit got under Bush was in 2008, his last year in office and last budget, at $455 billion. A lot of money. Second worst year (before adjusting for inflation) was 2004 at $413 billion, but it becomes the largest when adjusting for inflation at $462 billion.

Obama has topped all of that with gusto. His first budget ran a deficit of $1.4 trillion, that is to say $1,400 billion; that’s 12.3% of the GDP, the highest since World War 2. His 2010 budget is slated to be in the same range, but could go higher as the Left adds in more bailouts. Apparently Obama and his supporters believe that working Americans all have their own personal goose that lays golden eggs, or, like the Golgafrinchans, money grows on trees, literally. (For those not familiar with the Golgafrinchans, they are an alien people who crash-landed on prehistoric Earth and adopted the “leaf” as their legal form of currency, making it so that money really did grow on trees. From the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.)

During the Bush years, the left railed about the level of the National Debt, and how it doubled under Bush, from roughly $5.7 trillion to $10.6 trillion (rounding up, that is only a $5 trillion increase over 8 years, not a doubling. but it is still a LOT of change). But now, under Obama, the national debt as risen at a breakneck speed and in a mere 20 months (roughly) it has gone from the aforementioned level of $10.6 trillion to a whopping $13.3 trillion. That’s an increase of $2.7 trillion in under two years. It took Bush over five years to grow the debt by that much. At this rate we can expect the national debt to be over $17 TRILLION on January 20th, 2013 when Obama (God willing) leaves office; or, if Obama is re-elected and serves a second term (please, god, NO!), well over $24 TRILLION. This means that if we have to suffer under Obamanomics for eight years, the national debt will more than double yet again.

For those who have known me for any length of time (going back to my California days and the ‘92 election) you know that I have been ticked off about the level of the national debt for an awful long time, even before Clinton was elected.

The national debt is no longer a serious problem that can be ignored. Nor can it be blamed as a problem that Obama inherited from Bush. It’s a long running problem that goes back much further than when W was sworn into office. It is an extremely critical problem that needs to be addressed, and raising taxes will not solve it. Only significant cuts in spending, starting with all of those pork barrel projects and going all the way through to repealing the unconstitutional takeover of our healthcare system and ending the assortment government bailouts will do the job. At that point we can cut taxes and still reduce the national debt while keeping the Federal government on a Constitutional diet. And yes, that means no more taxpayer funding of things like the National Endowment of the Arts and National Public Radio, and other unconstitutional Federal programs.

Obama likes to quip how Bush drove the proverbial car into a ditch and he had to pull it out, ignoring the fact that the Democrats (including Obama when he was not out campaigning for President or voting “present”) were in the next seat doing the navigating.

It is time to take the keys to the car away from Obama and the Democrats before they drive the proverbial “car” off a cliff rather than just into the Chappaquiddick as they are now doing.

In the meantime, why isn’t the Left yelling about these humongous deficits that Obama and the Democrats are running up? Inquiring minds want to know.