Posted by
Frank Scaglione on Friday, May 08, 2009 8:20:09 AM
I hope to win a million dollars one day. I hope to have rippling abs one day. I hope my daughter will grow up in a country where she is free to enjoy the fruits of her labor without excessive government interference. We've all had more than 100 days of being filled with hope (longer if you count the election process) by President Obama. We've got so much hope we don't even know what to do with it. If America still had a free market the price of hope would have drastically collapsed as a result of the excess supply of hope. So why is it that in this new hopeful era of hope I'm not a millionaire? Why do I not have that illusive six pack yet? I've been hoping for both for years now. Maybe, and please stop reading if this sounds too crazy, maybe hope isn't enough. Maybe hope, alone, is as meaningless in the real world as it must be after having been written twelve times in one paragraph.
You see that is the problem with hope. Without a moral and achievable plan it is meaningless. The same holds true for nations. We can hope all we want, but without an economically viable national plan we don't have any hope. I was thinking about saying we don't have a prayer, but since this blog will be posted on the internet which is subject to the interstate trade clause of our once glorious Constitution, I'm afraid that may violate the sacred ethos of separation of church and everything.
So what is the dear leader's plan? We got our first concrete look into the mind of Obama last Thursday when the Whitehouse released their version of the 2010 budget. They, of course, are touting the the President's proposed budget cuts of $17 billion... in a budget of $3.4 trillion... and a deficit of $1.2 trillion. Kind of makes you yearn for the penny pinching days of the Bush administration when we only had $500 billion deficits huh?
The scariest part of these budget "cuts" is where they come from. 121 programs will be cut, more than half of which are in the defense sector. Don't get me wrong there are plenty of places in the DoD budget to trim fat and if cutting the DoD's budget could get us back in the green go for it, but in a year where we will spend more than $3 trillion redistributing wealth from the productive sector of society to the non-productive sector, $9 billionish in military cuts is a joke. Worse, it underscores the true nature of Obama. A nature any of the 55 million right minded individuals who voted against him already knew.
We all know it is not the military that is bankrupting the nation. It is our bloated welfare state that consumes nearly 2/3 of the national budget. But in this world of islamofacism, a rising communist China, a resurgent Russia and Karl Marx junior running Venezuela, Obama has shown a willingness to use the military as the sacrificial lamb in balancing the budget. While touting insidious taxes and government regulation through cap and trade. Big mistake! We had another President who did this and he was an unmitigated disaster. Jimmy Carter repeatedly cut defense programs and drastically increased government regulations. Ronald Reagan was able to fix one of those problems, but even he had little impact on the corrosive forces sprung on the United States by Carter's two new cabinet positions, the Department of Energy and Department of Education.
All of Obama's policies fly in the face of everything our Founding Fathers stood for; not to mention common sense. You can't make America safer by cozying up to dictators and slashing defense spending. You can't heal the market by nationalizing it and you can't fix the budget by cutting a measly $17 billion when the interest alone on the $1.2 trillion deficit dwarfs such cuts. America may be be more hopeful, but we do not have a leader with a sound plan. And when things get much worse, because of Obama's policies, don't come looking to me for hope. I'm fresh out.