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Obama's HOPE Is That He Gets All of Your CHANGE

Family Research Council

February 1, 2010

The President's new 2011 budget may have slashed money for NASA, but this administration is still on the verge of a new frontier in federal debt. His $3,800,000,000,000.00 proposal is the largest in U.S. history and -- without significant changes -- would add $8.5 trillion in American I.O.U.s by 2020. Of that, $1.3 trillion would be "new borrowing." For all of his talk about tightening America's belt, this President is adding more elastic! A "domestic spending freeze" makes for good television, but in the end, that's all it is: political theater.

To offset the spending, the White House promised across-the-board cuts. Unfortunately for taxpayers, they only amount to $20 billion in savings -- which barely cracks 1% of the total bill. Instead, the President plans to raise the money by slashing tax cuts for families, including the child tax credit (conceived by FRC) and the death tax. Although the average American will be swimming in red ink, the President's budget still includes billions more in education initiatives, Title X funding (which subsidizes groups that perform abortions), D.C. abortions, and the United Nation's Population Fund (which has been tied to coercive abortion). Using the President's own numbers, taxes would increase by $2 trillion under this budget in 10 years.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), a key player on the House Budget Committee, is gearing up for a congressional showdown. "Regrettably, the budget the administration... submitted to Congress is... a very aggressive agenda of more government spending, more taxes, more deficits, and more debt- with just [enough] cosmetic maneuvers to give the illusion of restraint." According to the Wall Street Journal, the entire package would push the debt as a percentage of the GDP to 77% from 53%.

And that doesn't begin to cover the second stimulus bill, which President Obama has threatened to ram through Congress this spring. The cost for Stimulus II? A cool $100 billion. Not surprisingly, the leadership is warning the Democrats not to call it a "stimulus bill"--a strategy that was lost on Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who spilled the beans on a "telephone townhall." "...[W]e're told not to call it another stimulus bill. We're calling it a jobs bill." Of course, the $787 billion "stimulus" bill was supposed to be about jobs too. Even if the plan did save or create 2.5 million jobs, as the White House claims, it still adds up to a whopping $315,000 per job. As FRC warned last spring, not every job was worth saving. Last Friday, a conservative blogger brok e the story that the President's first recovery package hid a $387,000 grant for Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts. Democrats can call it a jobs bill or a stimulus package--but in the end, it's nothing more than a Left-wing bailout with taxpayer money.