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President Barack Obama discusses the continuing budget talks Tuesday at the White House in Washington. (AP)
Back when he was running for president, Sen. Barack Obama blasted President George W. Bush over excessive federal spending and over our nation's borrowing money from Communist China to finance that spending.
Here is what Obama said during a campaign stop in Fargo, N.D., in 2008:
"The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents -- [Bush] added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back: $30,000 for every man, woman and child. It's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic."
Well then, the question has to be asked: If Sen. Obama thought $9 trillion in national debt was "irresponsible" and "unpatriotic," does President Obama think it is "irresponsible" and "unpatriotic" that under his leadership, our debt has exploded to $14.6 trillion? And is he as troubled about the $47,000 that each man, woman and child in America owes on the debt today as he was about the $30,000 that each man, woman and child owed back in 2008?
As for our borrowing money from Communist China, that certainly hasn't ceased during the Obama administration.
What makes this all worse is that the president now thinks America has to go deeper into debt -- and raise taxes and spending -- to fix our obviously broken economy.
But what evidence is there from our existing $14.6 trillion debt that even more spending is the answer? If deficit spending were the cure for weak economies, the United States should be rolling in the dough by now!
But that hasn't happened, and there is just no reason to think that throwing good spending after bad will restore our country to prosperity.
After reading the headline for this editorial, my first thought was to post it in Facebook, because I completely agree about Obama's failure to address the deficit problem he laid out in the 2008 campaign. However, when tied to a rejection of new revenue in the form of a cleaner tax code, the writer is no longer talking about fixing the deficit in a responsible manner. The problem is too big to be fixed by cuts alone. All that a sole focus on cuts would net us is a worse economy and a betrayal of good government. The Bush tax cuts, for example, cost more (i.e. increase our deficit) than they bring in in jobs or performance. Like any subsidy to one group, they serve to provide comfort not to create meaningful growth.
Thank you for making the point that SPENDING is the cause of our debt (giving another example of Oblamer as a hypocrite was pleasing also). The history of Congress is that they SPEND more than they take in. This "more" is debt. Therefore, higher taxes will only mean more debt. The taxes now taken in by the feds are more than sufficient to cover Constitutional spending. The hunger (taxes) of socialism can never be satisfied, it must be starved to death.
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