February 17, 2009

The Spending Bills and the Audacity of Scope

A week ago, Barack I solemnly intoned, “The federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back to life.”

Oh yeah? So what are the rest of us 300 million Americans and our $15 trillion in annual gross domestic product? Chopped liver? (Excuse my uncouthness, Your Eminence. Liver pate?)

It seems l’etat wasn’t enough for the Sun King and his jaw-dropping, breathtaking, heart-stopping hauteur. Now it’s la économie, c’est moi.

Recall how our Yes-We-Candidate promised to “get beyond the old ideological debates and divides between the left and the right?” Declared he, “We don't need bigger government or smaller government. We need better government.”

Uh, huh. That sentiment hardly got beyond a fortnight of the new regime.  

“Don’t need bigger government?” How about the largest federal undertaking in history? FDR and the New Deal? Piker. LBJ and the Great Society? Wimp. TJ and the Louisiana Purchase? Doesn’t even register. WWI and II, Vietnam, Iraq? Zzzz.

The combined Obama stimulus and bank incentive packages, weighing in at a trim $2.3 trillion, create a porker so corpulent that they will send this year’s deficit, by one estimate, crashing to some 13.5 percent of GDP.

Call it the Audacity of Scope.

We’re going to “get beyond the old ideological debates and divides”? You betcha! Debates are so 2008. It’s much simpler now: The O-way . . . or go ‘way.

Public opprobrium? No biggie. Hey, wasn’t this what the last election was all about?

Republican opposition? No worries: “I won.” Don’t bother to include any of those guys in the drafting or final negotiations over the bill.

Forty-eight hours to read the final 1,400-page monstrosity before a vote? No time. Gotta set up the road show to sign this baby in Denver. Oh. That’s where I gave that pre-coronation speech before the Greek columns? How prophetic.

And “we need better government?” Puh-lease.

The One’s logo may have been a rising sun, but three weeks in, the sun’s now setting on the good-government reforms of an entire generation. The O-ministration’s game – payback to favored constituencies.

Welfare reform? Gone. Growth-promoting tax policies? Why bother, when there are so many tax credits to hand out to people who don’t pay taxes. My man Chuck Grassley brought up the president’s own job-creating campaign proposal to zero out capital gains taxes for small businesses. Back in your face, bro.

At least we get a stimulus bill that actually stimulates, right? In your dreams. Even many of the Democrats’ own leading economists, including Bill Clinton’s former budget director, pooh-poohed that notion. And Bank Bailout II proved so lacking that, according to the Wall Street Journal, it had market pros at a securities conference laughing out loud.

Instead, we’ll get payouts to teachers unions, Planned Parenthood and those upstanding community organizers at ACORN, who in anticipation are already staging protests at the reeling banks they had helped force into bad loans.

A Trojan horse health care reform putting bureaucrats in charge of end-of-life decisions. Bailouts of states that spent like good times would never end. And “green jobs” – not so much for their eco-friendliness as for the color of the tax dollars they will send down the rat hole.

The sheer nerve of these Democrats underscores the massive failure of the Bushies to push through their mandate to reform Social Security, the tax code or even Fannie and Freddie – any or all of which could have helped avoid the present mess.

It’s all a wistful memory now. The new reality: What O says, goes. Along with your children’s children’s children’s future.

Pate, anyone?