The Balance Of Spending

Cato has a pair of articles looking at Obama’s once and future spending.  In response to Karl “deficits don’t matter” Rove’s hypocritical screed on deficits, Daniel Mitchell makes a point that has been grating on my nerves as well:

I’m a big fan of criticizing Obama’s profligacy, but it is inaccurate and/or dishonest to blame him for Bush’s mistakes. At the risk of repeating my earlier post, the 2009 fiscal year began on October 1, 2008, and the vast majority of the spending for that year was the result of Bush Administration policies. Yes, Obama did add to the waste with the so-called stimulus, the omnibus appropriation, the CHIP bill, and the cash-for-clunkers nonsense, but as the chart illustrates, these boondoggles only amounted to just a tiny percentage of the FY2009 total – about $140 billion out of a $3.5 trillion budget.

I would add that most of the stimulus is slated for next year, not this year.

I had family in town for the holidays and so Fox News was on the tube a lot.  I heard a lot of this Born Again Fiscal Conservatism, some of it from Turd Blossom himself.  I find it impossible to take seriously.  Of the record deficit this year, a tremendous amount can be laid at Bush’s door in form of TARP and the two wars.  That’s not even blaming him for the revenue drop caused by the recession—or that his “tax cut” made federal revenues more vulnerable to such downturns.  And of the massive projected deficits in the future, much of it is the structural deficits of Medicare and Social Security which Bush inherited but only made worse.

To hear clarion calls for fiscal discipline from the guys who stood around silently while all this happened is laughable.  I have no doubt that if the Republicans took Congress back, they would go back to spending like maniacs and Rove/Hannity/Beck et al. would go back to being quiet about it.  No attack on our current fiscal situation can be made unless we acknowledge how we got here.  And without any actual, you know, ideas about how to cut spending—such as raising the retirement age, slowing the COLA adjustments or cutting defense spending—it is all pure empty partisan screaming (laced, unfortunately, with the usual faux populism and anti-intellectualism).

We can’t afford this bullshit right now.  We’re on the brink of the situation getting even worse—when Obama’s college kid spending habits do kick in.  FY 2010 will see the peak in stimulus spending—one that is likely to become a permanent year-to-year fixture.  Obama has yet to reveal any plan whatsoever for reigning in Medicare and Social Security—or at least one that does not involve massive (and deceptively packaged) spending.  Hell, he passed a cynical increase in SS payments to buy senior votes despite the recommendations of the trustees.  And then there’s this.  Beyond the $2 trillion (and growing) direct cost of PelosiRediCare, Michael Cannon looks at the indirect costs:

When the bills force somebody to pay $10,000 to the government, the Congressional Budget Office treats that as a tax.  When the government then hands that $10,000 to private insurers, the CBO counts that as government spending.  But when the bills achieve the exact same outcome by forcing somebody to pay $10,000 directly to a private insurance company, it appears nowhere in the official CBO cost estimates — neither as federal revenues nor federal spending.  That’s a sharp departure from how the CBO treated similar mandates in the Clinton health plan.  And it hides maybe 60 percent of the legislation’s total costs.

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When we correct for both gimmicks, counting both on- and off-budget costs over the first 10 years of implementation, the total cost of ObamaCare reaches — I’m so sorry about this — $6.25 trillion.  That’s not a precise estimate.  It’s just far closer to the truth than President Obama and congressional Democrats want the debate to be.

All this should make me flock back to the conservatives, should make me putty in Karl Rove’s flabby hands.  But when I look that way, all I see is the same fuckers who made a hash of the last eight years trying to sneak in through the back door.  They were willing collaborators in Bush’s fiscal pillage and their current eigenstate—brushing off the past, not proposing any serious spending cuts—demonstrates that they have no intention of fixing the situation.  Hell, I am not at all convinced that if the GOP were returned to power right now, they wouldn’t just steal PelosiReidCare, sneak it across the border, file off the serial numbers and sell it back to us as BohnerCare.  That’s how bad they’ve been and how empty their rhetoric is.

(A GOP Congress with a Democratic President might be fiscally conservative just for partisan’s sake.  I’m willing to take that chance in 2010.  But I’m not willing to see them take both Congress and the White House.  Not yet.)

Watching Fox News was a revelation to me that I’ve gone through the looking glass.  These people are saying what I want to hear and expecting me to follow along.  But I refuse to be fooled again.  I’ll know someone is serious when they have the guts to propose cutting the big programs.  Until then, I will continue to attack in both directions.