President Obama, The $4 Trillion Man

Earlier this week, President Obama addressed both chambers of Congress to discuss the economy and his plans for the coming years of his administration. During his speech and throughout his campaign, the President promised to end the era of earmarks and deficit spending. He went as far to promise to go line by line through any spending measure and publicize all earmark spending and which congressman had requested it. Just one month into his administration, we have seen massive pork barrel spending and non-stop “the sky is falling” rhetoric.

The ink from President Obama’s pen had not had time to dry on the $800 billion “stimulus” bill, before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through another $400 billion spending bill. The newest spending bill from Congress contains more than 8000 earmarks. This is on top of the countless earmarks in the “stimulus” bill. The new administration and Congress have signed on to spend more than $1.2 trillion in the first 30 days since the Inauguration. To put that into perspective, that is more than half of the federal budget for 2004, or almost half of what the federal government received in tax revenue for all of 2008. We are more than $1.2 trillion more in debt and we are not even into March yet. Of course, Obama’s breathless supporters in the media would tell us to wait until his budget comes out to see where he has made the cuts to pay for the massive deficit spending, but his budget calls for a more than $1 trillion increase in spending over this years’ budget.

The President has released his budget proposal and it totals over $4 trillion, with about $1.75 trillion in projected deficit spending. This is the largest increase in federal spending in our history. In 2008 the federal budget was a paltry, by comparison, $2.978 trillion with total revenue received at $2.523 trillion. That budget had about $450 billion in deficit spending, but to jump to $1.75 trillion in deficit spending and then claim that you are going to control spending is laughable.

The $4,000,000,000,000.00 budget includes tax increases for those making more than $250,000. My friends in the class envy camp applaud this notion of taxing the rich, but they fail to see that a majority of small businesses will now see tax increases. Allow me to ask one simple question. How will your life improve if some nameless “rich” person is taxed more? The Bill Gates and George Soros’ of the world will not pay any more in taxes; they will simply shift their money around to avoid the taxes. The small business owners are the ones that will bear the brunt of the tax increase. After this plan fails to raise the revenue that the “experts” in Washington project, they will be forced to either raise taxes on the rest of us, after all it is the patriotic thing to do, or hopefully they will see the error of their ways and cut taxes across the board. This budget is equivalent to $11,833 for every American.

President Obama was elected on a platform of hope and change; the first indicators of his administration definition of that campaign slogan are beginning to become clear. They are desperately hoping that the voting public will not notice that the change is the unprecedented spending and power grab in Washington. I believe that the voting public is very aware of what affects their wallets and they have a very long memory when it comes to their own financial well being.