Friday, March 06, 2009

Hope May Be Changing

Remember the fuss last fall when Christopher Buckley resigned from National Review--the conservative magazine founded by his late father--after endorsing Barack Obama? Well Buckley-the-younger appears to be having second thoughts:
Hold on—there’s a typo in that paragraph. "$3.6 trillion budget" can’t be right.The entire national debt is—what—about $11 trillion? He can’t actually be proposing to spend nearly one-third of that in one year, surely. Let me check. Hmm. He did. The Wall Street Journal notes that federal outlays in fiscal 2009 will rise to almost 30 percent of the gross national product. In language that even an innumerate English major such as myself can understand: The US government is now spending annually about one-third of what the entire US economy produces. . .

If this is what the American people want, so be it, but they ought to have no illusions about the perils of this approach. Mr. Obama is proposing among everything else $1 trillion in new entitlements, and entitlement programs never go away, or in the oddly poetic bureaucratic jargon, "sunset." He is proposing $1.4 trillion in new taxes, an appetite for which was largely was whetted by the shameful excesses of American CEO corporate culture. And finally, he has proposed $5 trillion in new debt, one--half the total accumulated national debt in all US history. All in one fell swoop.

He tells us that all this is going to work because the economy is going to be growing by 3.2 percent a year from now. Do you believe that? Would you take out a loan based on that?
And Buckley's not the only one.

(via Conservative Grapevine)

3 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

"Hold on—there’s a typo in that paragraph. "$3.6 trillion budget" can’t be right."

Well, that was my thought when Buckley endorsed Obama.

OBloodyHell said...

> Would you take out a loan based on that?

Depends... Is it at the Bank of Obama?

Anonymous said...

Let's bash Obama instead of offering solutions to the problems created by dishonest, greedy capitalists who have practically destroyed our capitalist system. Without honesty and hard work, capitalism can't work. Name-calling and knee-jerk conservativism offer nothing to the solution of these horrendous economic/financial/social/human problems created by the hypocrites who trash unions/Democrats/other-labeled people. Be real. Solve the problems. Don't pretend you are superior to what you call your opposition. If you believed in Democracy, you would realize that Obama is currently our President and not your foe.