What will the ultimate results of Obama's budget and tax hikes be? In general terms, bad news. But in terms of how much of the U.S. economy is going to be swallowed up by government, it looks even worse.
Patrick Buchanan, writing for Town Hall, gives us some particulars:
| Where the U.S. government usually consumes 21 percent of gross domestic product, this Obama budget spends 28 percent in 2009 and runs a deficit of $1.75 trillion, or 12.7 percent of GDP. That is four times the largest deficit of George W. Bush and twice as large a share of the economy as any deficit run since World War II. Add that 28 percent of GDP spent by the U.S. government to the 12 percent spent by states, counties and cities, and government will consume 40 percent of the economy in 2009. |
40%. And most of that is going to be wasted on welfare programs and socialist wealth redsitribution schemes.
More:
| Since the budget was released, word has come that the U.S. economy did not shrink by 3.8 percent in the fourth quarter, but 6.2 percent. All the assumptions in Obama's budget about growth in 2009 and 2010 need to be revised downward, and the deficits revised upward. Look for the deficit for 2009 to cross $2 trillion. |
Do you remember just two years ago when the Dems were screaming that Bush's budget was causing a deficit and how the Dems were going to fix that for us? I guess when the Dems said "fix" it they meant they were going to send it soaring even higher than Bush ever tried to do.
And this:
| Who abroad is going to lend us the trillions to finance our deficits without demanding higher interest rates on the U.S. bonds they are being asked to hold? And if we must revert to the printing press to create the money, what happens to the dollar? ... Who is going to pay for all this? The top 2 percent, the filthy rich who got all those Bush tax breaks, say Democrats. But the top 5 percent of income earners already pay 60 percent of U.S. income taxes, while the bottom 40 percent pays nothing. |
And that bottom forty percent are going to get nice fat checks next April, that is, wealth will be redistributed to them despite the fact that they do not invest, they do not employ other people and their tax burdern was 0. In other words, Obama is making good on his promise so that he can complete the deal of buying off their votes. What is going to happen when the banks no longer honor those government checks, though?
And the reason we know that Obamanomics is going to be a disaster:
| Markets are not infallible. But the stock market has long been a "lead indicator" of where the economy will be six months from now. What are the markets, the collective decisions of millions of investors, saying? Having fallen every month since Obama's election, with January and February the worst two months in history, they are telling us the stimulus package will not work, that Tim Geithner is clueless about how to save the banks, that the Obama budget portends disaster for the republic. |
Which is why we need to put up a huge fight over the budget and the way this administration is dragging us towards socialism.
You can access the complete column on-line here:
Pitchfork Time
Patrick J. Buchanan
TownHall.com
March 3, 2009
