SL 02-17-2012

February 17, 2012
As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America
By Seth Leibsohn

This week, we saw two things worth talking about this morning:  President Barack Obama’s job approvals ticked upwards and he released his new annual budget.  We’ll get to the job approval in a moment, but first the budget.

In his second month in office, the President promised to cut the deficit in half. Let’s look at what recent budget deficits have been.  The last budget President Bush disseminated in 2008 scheduled a deficit of 482 billion dollars.  President Obama’s first budget, released in 2009, scheduled a deficit of 1.75 trillion dollars.  His next budget, released in 2010 had a 1.26 trillion dollar deficit.  The budget he released last year had a 1.1 trillion dollar projected deficit which we are now told will be 1.3 trillion.  And this past week, his budget for next year contemplates a budget deficit of just over 900 billion dollars—if you think he can keep it there.

I say “if you think he can keep it there” because of three things:  a) Each deficit he projected was lower in the projection than in the actuality; b) he is the only president to have actually submitted three budgets in a row with projected deficits of over one trillion dollars each; and c)  there is no way to cut the deficit in half when you keep breaking the bank with them.  And I say “breaking the bank” because we merely have to look at our national debt to see where this administration has taken our debt after three years of blaming President Bush for fiscal irresponsibility.  Let’s do that now.  When President Obama took office, our national debt was 10.6 trillion dollars.  Today it is 15.3 trillion dollars.  It has risen five trillion dollars under President Obama.  (And, just in case you are wondering, yes, it went up five trillion dollars under President Bush as well, but over the course of eight years and two wars—not three years and the ending of wars).

Now, one small point I want to dispatch with right now, and we will return to it at greater length next week.  The Bush tax cuts.  The next time you hear someone say the Bush tax cuts caused this, all you need know is one and half things:  If we restored the taxes on the top earners in this country that President Bush cut, that would bring in a whopping 80 billion dollars to our treasury.  It wouldn’t amount to even a drop in the bucket of our deficit.  Eighty billion dollars doesn’t even cover the difference between President Obama’s real deficits and his projected deficits.  It doesn’t even cover one tenth of his stimulus program which, to repeat, saw unemployment go up.

So, a promise of fiscal restraint is nowhere in sight, just as a campaign for fiscal restraint in 2008 has nowhere been achieved.  A broken campaign promise, a broken presidential promise.

While we are on this topic, though, let’s take a look at a few items from the new budget that was released this week.  Where does it expand and where does it cut, and you tell me if this look like our priorities are in order.  The Department of Education gets a 3.6% budget increase, the largest increase of all departments outside of State, Veterans Affairs, and Commerce.  What gets cut?  Homeland Security and Defense.  Is our world more safe?  Is our country more safe?  I submit that, from several areas of concern, our world and our country are becoming less safe.

This includes Iraq, which is now falling into the hands of Iran; Iran, which is closer to a nuclear weapon than ever; Egypt, which is now a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold and has, by the way, restored relations with Iran; and Russia, whose appetite we appeased in the START treaty and is growing more aggressive by the day. It could also include Afghanistan, as we are now attempting to negotiate with the Taliban.  It could also include Venezuela, who we have appeased in siding against the anti-Chavez forces in Honduras and in saying it is not a threat.  It could also include China who we appease by sheer appeasement, including the snubbing of the Dalai Lama.

As for what we have achieved with our record deficit spending—it wasn’t lower unemployment.  President Obama came into office with an unemployment rate of 7.8 percent.  He pushed and passed a stimulus package that spent over 800 billion dollars that was meant to keep unemployment from, by his own advisors’ words, going beyond 8 percent.  Well, unemployment went over 10 percent under President Obama and today it is still over 8 percent.  In fact, 1.2 million fewer Americans are working today than when President Obama took office.  So, let’s just summarize his budget and success on his budgets in one phrase:  Higher deficits, less jobs.  If you don’t like that, try this:  More spending, more unemployment.

So let us pause and ask where has his success been, why does he deserve an uptick in approval ratings?

Have our international relations and relationships improved, have they been reset as he said he wanted to do?  Well, on a couple of accounts, yes, they have been reset--backwards.  We are farther and have put more space between ourselves and many of our allies than ever before.  To wit, Israel, Great Britain, the Czech Republic, Poland, Canada, and Egypt.  That’s not a reset to be proud of—indeed, it does not even reach the level of embarrassment, it is, rather, the madness of fools and dangerous.  It has put Israel in greater danger of extinction, it has made other countries more vulnerable.  And, it has breathed new life into both Sunni and Shiite radicalism.

How about his great domestic achievement, health care reform?  Let’s just put a few things together on that.  First, it took legislative tricks to pass the Senate and it didn’t receive one Republican vote there.  It received a total of one Republican vote in the House, and that Republican is gone.  By the way, 34 Democrats voted against it in the House—making the vote against it more bi-partisan than the vote for it.  And, today, the latest polling has Obamacare unfavorability at 44 percent compared to a favorability of 37 percent.  When it passed, 39 percent of Americans supported the law.  So: it passed against the wishes of the American people, and it has become less popular today.  Has this major law, by the way, fixed healthcare in anyway?  Indeed, it has not. The uninsured population has jumped to over 17 percent, up from 14.8 percent in George Bush’s last year in office.  And, as the past three weeks have shown, it is now being used as a sledgehammer against religious freedom. Many of us think the law unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause.  But today, we see the law being used to attack religious freedom.  The First Amendment.  That is the price we are paying for this monumental piece of legislation.  The very freedoms we came here for and founded this country upon.

There is so much I have not addressed here but let us summarize:

Record deficits, an increased national debt, more unemployment, worse relations with our allies, appeasement of our enemies, a new entitlement, less religious freedom.

Let’s do that one more time: Record deficits, an increased national debt, more unemployment, worse relations with our allies, appeasement of our enemies, a new entitlement, less religious freedom.

That, today, is the Obama record.  And we see his numbers go up.  What is my point?  My point is our opposition is not working and we have one chance to try to turn this around.  Chance.  Try.  That is November.  We can do it.  But it’s going to take a lot more vigilance.  A lot more attention. A lot more education. A lot more talking.  And a lot more activism.

Things have been worse in this country and we’ve turned them around.  The question I have is this:  Can we afford to let them get worse yet, and if so, will it be possible to turn it around?  That is the difference between now and then: when we were up against the wall in the past, during the Civil War, during the Great Depression, during the Carter years, we had an ability to turn things around.  To summon ourselves to the better angels of our nature, to roll up our sleeves and go about the work of repairing ourselves.  Four more years—and again, I haven’t even mentioned energy independence or regulations that hamper hiring and investment—four more years and I don’t know if we can do it.  Let’s not find out.