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:

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: