Not surprisingly, Obama and Congress keep adding “fixes” to ObamaCare, quietly adding to the cost of that man-made disaster. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the other supposedly “honest economists” and estimators in Washington who “score” the fiscal decisions of politicians remind me of an old joke I heard when I was in an economics program at Georgetown University.
A math teacher, an accountant and a political economist are up for a job. The interviewer asks the math teacher, “What does one plus one equal?” The math teacher quickly says, “Two!”
Next, the interviewer asks the accountant what one plus one is, and the accountant says, “Two.”
Lastly, the veteran Washington political economist is called in and is posed the same simple question: “What does one plus one equal?” The economist gets up from his chair, locks the office door, rolls down the window shades, and leans across the interviewer’s desk. “Just what would you like me to make it equal to?”
With all the revisions and “government math,” it makes you wonder just how dumb our politicians are when it comes to business. As Steven Wright would say, half of them would see a sign that says “24 Hour Banking” and not go in because they figure they don’t have that much time.
While the Democrats are awful, Republicans under George Bush were also a fiscal disappointment. Federal outlays (spending) grew from $1.86 trillion in 2001 to $3.5 trillion in 2009. As bad as the GOP President and Democrat Congress were in the late 2000s, Obama is making Bush look like a piker. His deficit spending alone will equal the entire 2001 budget outlays of about $1.8 trillion. Yes, our budget deficit is now equal to the entire spending of our government ten years ago.
And over the next 10 years, it is predicted that our deficit will be $10 trillion more — not the “change” we voted for. It took Bush eight years and two unnecessary wars to amass $3.3 trillion in debt; Obama will rack up $4.7 trillion in what I hope will be only four years. He is also trying to use the Gulf oil spill (never let a disaster go to waste) to pass his Cap-and-Tax climate bill, which will cost us jobs and untold trillions more.
We are so in debt to China that President Obama had to visit their president in his first year in office. It was an important meeting between the most powerful communist leader in the world and the president of China.
Obama is so popular in China that a nightclub named after him opened in Beijing. In keeping with the Obama theme, the club opened with $10 trillion in debt. It will, hopefully, close in just four years with $15 trillion in debt and no apologies to its “hope-based” investors.
I hope we do not become like Japan, a country that thinks it never met a problem it could not solve with a robot, but which lost 20 years’ worth of returns in its markets because of bad political policies. We have had a lost decade so far, and things don’t look like they are getting any better.
To sum up our situation just short of two years into this Obamanation of an administration: Our debt is much higher, an unwanted ObamaCare bill that will cost us at least $2 trillion more than predicted was rammed through Congress, more troops are in Afghanistan, unemployment is much higher even after a union handout “stimulus” bill, and the biggest tax increase in American history is coming in 2011. So yes, Mr. President, technically I guess you can say you have brought about “change.”
As for your assertion, Mr. Obama, that you are going to usher in a “new chapter in U.S. history,” it looks like you will make good on that too. Unfortunately, it will be Chapter 11.
Ron Hart is a libertarian op-ed humorist columnist, author, and TV and radio commentator. He can be contacted at Ron@RonaldHart.com or www.RonaldHart.com.