You Call That a Plan?

Obama most recent teleprompter recital simply served up another turd sandwich. This whole budget thing is nothing but smoke and mirrors. Obama's goal is to continuously increase the size of the government and the number of people forced to rely on government handouts to survive.

For all the pretense of fiscal responsibility, this year's deficit will be another record year, equal to roughly $1.6 trillion. Obama's master plan deals with a minute fraction of symbolic cuts, then punts on the spending at the heart of the deficit - entitlements. Filtering out all the scare tactics and ever-present campaign rhetoric, Obama simply wants to resort to the century-old Democratic formula of "tax the wealthy".

It is hard to imagine that Obama, or any other sane person for that matter, truly believes that raising the tax rates on incomes above $250,000 will fix our problem. I think he just wants to appease those Democrats on the far left, while pretending to be the leader everyone expected him to be. Especially wonderful was Obama's decision not to implement any real cuts until 2013 - right after his (hopefully unsuccessful) reelection.

According to IRS data, the entire taxable incomes of everyone making $100,000 or above in 2008 amounted to a bit less than $1.58 trillion. Even if every one of these people (of which I am one, and am far from wealthy) were taxed at 100%, it would not even cover Obama's deficit for this year alone.

Don't let this charlatan fool you. He lives in some weird liberal Twilight Zone, where everyone believes that the money you earn actually belongs to the government, and anyone who wants to lie on the sofa, only getting up to cash government checks, has a right to do so.

Our problem exists because each and every government program is important to someone, and all the squabbling and in-fighting between political parties will not allow any substantial cuts to take place. Cutting spending across the board, leaving no program untouched, is the only way to eliminate the partisan deadlock. But this will never happen. Our only hope is that the Republicans will win a 60-seat majority in the Senate in 2012, but only if we can get rid of the old guard GOP RINO's along with it.

Keeping in mind the magnitude of our current deficit, $1.6 trillion in spending cuts is required just to balance this year's budget. Both Obama and Boehner are trying to take credit for the "historic" levels of spending cuts recently agreed upon in order to prevent the government from shutting down. My calculator shows that $38.5 billion in cuts (a figure that is now in question) makes a very tiny dent, barely one cent on the dollar, in the $3.8 trillion our government will spend in fy2011.

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How much is a trillion dollars? Numbers this size are difficult for most people to comprehend. Maybe this will help:  take one thousand dollar bills and put them in a pile. After you make one thousand piles, you would have $1 million.  Do this every day for 1,000 years, you would have piled up $365 billion.  This is a lot of money, roughly equal to what the US spent on oil imports in 2008.

After 2,000 years, you would have stacked up $730 billion, or a bit less than Obama's 2009 "Stimulus Bill" squandered on bailing out state governments and repaying unions for his election.

Finally, after nearly 3,000 years (2,739 you would have made a pile equalling $1 trillion. That is a really, really big pile of dollars. And currently our national debt is over 14 piles of this size...and growing by the second.