Tag Archives: Deficit Spending

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown excoriated over massive debt

Spotted this awesome video over at The Anchoress. This is a MUST-SEE video. If only someone had the courage to take on President Teleprompter and the economic-illiterates who voted for him, like this British MP takes on Gordon Brown.

The Anchoress has a bunch of great links there, as well.

Excerpt from her post:

Here in the United States, land of the First Amendment and free speech, it is right now unthinkable that anyone would stand up in a political chamber and speak so forthrightly.

I mean…can you imagine someone in our Congress or Senate actually standing up with a chart like this, and daring to talk to Obama about his “inherited” debt?

Michele Bachmann could do it. Also, here’s the chart that she mentions from Ace of Spades: (watch out for vulgar language!)

Obama's projected deficits
Obama's projected deficits

Gateway Pundit has more here:

President Obama expects the deficit level to be 12% of GDP this year.

America is actually in worse shape than Great Britain.
According to Heritage, Obama has already helped quadruple the deficit with his stimulus package.

Hot Air has links to the MP’s youtube page and blog. Apparently this is normal for him, although Hot Air says he isn’t a solid conservative.

Here’s his YouTube page, chock full of more in this vein, and here’s his blog, in which he marvels at the ability of the ‘Net to turn a backbench parliamentarian into an international fiscal conservative hero overnight. Exit question: We’re all agreed that Hannan gets to deliver the GOP’s response to next year’s State of the Union, yes?

Some people who voted for Obama told me during the election that Obama would be much more fiscally responsible than Bush and Reagan, because Republicans are all big spenders. They couldn’t stand the 550 billion we spent securing our liberty in two wars against radical terrorism. Obama is going to run the national debt up to over 20 trillion by 2019. Which amount is greater?

I asked 2 of my Obama-voting friends today how much the 2 wars cost, and neither of them knew. They did not even believe me when I showed them the actual numbers. What do they do in the evenings? Why, they watch Family Guy, Rachel Maddow and sports. One of these people actually told me that Rachel Maddow was a centrist. The other one is the more ignorant of the two.

Lastly, two of my fundamentalist Christian friends told me that Obama was more pro-life than McCain. Yes, they really said that! If you have a story about someone who voted for Obama who ought to have known better, please put it in the comments!

Judd Gregg says Obama’s budget will bankrupt the country

UPDATE: Welcome visitors from Free Canuckistan! Thanks for the linky, Binky!

Found this post over at Gateway Pundit. You’ll remember that Judd Gregg is one of those fiscally conservative New Hampshire senators, an expert on business, finance and economics. Despite being a Republican, he was nominated by Obama for the Cabinet position of Commerce Secretary. He backed out of it, though. And now we can guess why.

Last month, he warned that the budget would bankrupt the USA:

A new video from CNN is here. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript:

“The practical implications of this is bankruptcy for the United States,” Gregg said of the Obama’s administration’s recently released budget blueprint. “There’s no other way around it. If we maintain the proposals that are in this budget over the ten-year period that this budget covers, this country will go bankrupt. People will not buy our debt, our dollar will become devalued. It is a very severe situation.”

“Your listeners have to understand how staggering the numbers are. We’re talking about a deficit in the trillion-dollar range for as far as the eye can see. We’re talking about deficits which are 4% to 5% of GDP – which is not sustainable under any form of government. We’re talking about a public debt – this is a debt that people own of the federal government – that will be around 80% of GDP. Historically, it’s been around 40% of GDP in the out years. The practical implication of this is bankruptcy for the United States. There’s no other way around it.”

I know people who denounced Bush, McCain and Palin. They voted for this ACORN lawyer. As if Obama was God’s gift to small government conservatism. They wouldn’t read a single economics book. I remember showing them numbers from Citizens Against Government Waste and American Taxpayers Union, which they rejected.

Here’s one more interesting piece from the always wonderful IBD (editorial, podcast). I include the details of the Bush and Reagan budgets, for comparison with Obama’s budget.

Excerpt:

According to the CBO, the Obama administration lowballed its deficit forecast by $482 billion over the next four years and $2.3 trillion over the next 10. In other words, the CBO says that 10-year deficits will be 33% higher than the president claims, should his plans get enacted.

This makes Obama’s budget one of the worst accounting jobs ever put forward in modern times by a new administration.

When the CBO reviewed George W. Bush’s first budget, for example, the difference between what Bush said his budget would cost and what the CBO said it would cost was minimal.

…Reagan’s first budget, which was widely panned for allegedly employing rosy scenarios to cook the numbers, differed from the CBO by just 1.2% in projected revenues and 5% in spending over the first four years.

So why the huge gap between Obama and the CBO?

Obama’s team employed one of the oldest budget tricks in the books — exaggerating economic growth — to hide the true cost of his tax and spending plans. Budget forecasts are hugely sensitive to predictions about GDP growth, inflation, unemployment and interest rates. Even slight differences can have a huge impact on projected outlays and revenues.

And in his budget, Obama is positively Pollyannaish about the economy, predicting 3.2% real GDP growth next year, compared to the CBO’s 2.9% and the Blue Chip consensus forecast of 1.9%. While the CBO and Blue Chip think unemployment will be 9% in 2010, Obama claims it will be only 7.9%. And so on.

Here’s an image I stole from IBD:

IBD: Publically-held debt
IBD: Publically-held debt

Read the whole editorial! And don’t foget to subscribe to IBD’s podcast feed. It’s FREE!

Michelle Malkin has more details on Obama’s “public-private partnership” plan for economic recovery.

Excerpt:

France, Germany and Italy warn G20 nations against Obammunism

I was browsing over at the Anchoress and I found some very interesting links in her link-filled post here. She runs a blog that features a mix of Catholic-oriented reflections and a conservative perspective on the news of the day.

Here’s the part of her post that caught my attention:

Not good: First Putin told him not to, now France and Germany. Boy, didn’t the left HATE when Bush was this stubborn and set on his own way? And he didn’t listen to other countries? I seem to remember the left really, really hating that. About Bush. They hated these things too. When Bush did them.

Here is the warning from France and Germany from the Financial Times, via American Thinker:

Disagreements between the European Union and the US over how to combat the global recession widened on Tuesday as EU governments made clear they had little appetite for piling up more debt to fight the collapse in output and jobs.

Finance ministers from the 27-nation bloc insisted in Brussels that it was doing enough to support world demand and did not need at present to adopt another fiscal stimulus plan, as Washington is urging.

The US-European differences are casting a shadow over next month’s summit in London of leaders from the G20 group of advanced and emerging economies, an event to be attended by Barack Obama on his first visit to Europe as US president.

It’s true that France, Germany and Italy have all elected conservative leaders recently, (along with Japan, Canada, the Czech Republic and Mexico). I thought that these European socialist countries were to the left of the USA. Are we now to the left of France, Germany and Italy?

You might remember that I posted recently about former-communist Russia warning Obama about the dangers of socialism. Former-communist China also warned Obama to stimulate the economy with tax cuts, not spending. Instead, Obama raised taxes and spent trillions.

Canada, Japan and Mexico also elected conservatives governments. Why can’t we be more like them? Why do we have to embrace Obama’s unilateral, cowboy-communism? Why must Obama anger the world with unpopular economic policies that fail the “global test”? Why does Obama make the world hate us?