Byron York reminds readers of Congressional democrats posing as deficit hawks back when George W. Bush was in the White House. Now that they have control of Congress and the White House they are using the recession as a pretext for a budgetary blowout calculated to make the Great Society look like a Presbyterian picnic. Americans will be paying for Obama’s first month in office for a generation.

Back in 2006, when Democrats were hoping to win control of the House and Senate, party leaders worked themselves into a righteous outrage over the issue of out-of-control federal spending. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the Republican budget “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic” because it increased the amount of U.S. debt held by foreign countries. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., accused Republicans of going on “an unprecedented and dangerous borrowing spree” and declared GOP leadership “the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of our country … no other president or Congress even comes close.”

You won’t find too many defenders of George W. Bush’s record on spending these days, even among Republicans. But a check of historical tables compiled by the Office of Management and Budget shows that the spending that so distressed Pelosi and Reid seems downright modest today. After beginning with a Clinton-era surplus of $128 billion in fiscal year 2001, the Bush administration racked up deficits of $158 billion in 2002, $378 billion in 2003, $413 billion in 2004, $318 billion in 2005, $248 billion in 2006, $162 billion in 2007, and $410 billion in 2008.

The current administration would kill to have such small numbers. President Barack Obama is unveiling his budget this week, and, in addition to the inherited Bush deficit, he’s adding his own spending at an astonishing pace, projecting annual deficits well beyond $1 trillion in the near future, and, in the rosiest possible scenario, a $533 billion deficit in 2013, the last year of Obama’s first term.

And what about the national debt? It increased from $5 trillion to $10 trillion in the Bush years, leading to dramatically higher interest costs. “We pay in interest four times more than we spend on education and four times what it will cost to cover 10 million children with health insurance for five years,” Pelosi said in 2007. “That’s fiscal irresponsibility.”

Now, under Obama, the national debt — and the interest payments — will increase at a far faster rate than during the Bush years.

“We thought the Bush deficits were big at the time,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, told me this week as he prepared to attend Obama’s Fiscal Responsibility Summit. “But this is going to make the previous administration look like rank amateurs. We could be adding multiple trillions to the national debt in the first year.”

At some point last week, the sheer velocity of Obama’s spending proposals began to overwhelm even experienced Washington hands. In the span of four days, we saw the signing of the $787 billion stimulus bill, the rollout of a $275 billion housing proposal, discussion of Congress’s remaining appropriations bills (about $400 billion) and word of a vaguely-defined financial stabilization plan that could ultimately cost $2 trillion. When representatives of GM and Chrysler said they might need $21 billion more to survive, it seemed like small beer.

First you throw away $787 billion dollars on democrat party special interests, then you raise taxes on “the rich,” i.e., you, me, and Joe the Plumber, and finally you cut the Defense Budget.

After all, in 2008, with two wars underway, we spent the staggering sum of $667 billion (base budget of $480 billion and $187 billion in supplemental spending) on national defense. Why, we wasted almost as much money last year on defending the country as Obama spent in his first month in office on “community development” (i.e., ACORN), the National Endowment for the Arts, more welfare, green boondoggles, and fattening the wallets of politically connected construction companies.

Washington Post:

President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four years, primarily by raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy and by slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration officials said.

In addition to tackling a deficit swollen by the $787 billion stimulus package and other efforts to ease the nation’s economic crisis, the budget blueprint will press aggressively for progress on the domestic agenda Obama outlined during the presidential campaign. This would include key changes to environmental policies and a major expansion of health coverage that he hopes to enact later this year.

A summary of Obama’s budget request for the fiscal year that begins in October will be delivered to Congress on Thursday, with the complete, multi-hundred-page document to follow in April. But Obama plans to unveil his goals for scaling back record deficits and rebuilding the nation’s costly and inefficient health care system tomorrow, when he addresses lawmakers and budget experts at a White House summit on restoring “fiscal responsibility” to Washington. …

Even before Congress approved the stimulus package this month, congressional budget analysts forecast that this year’s deficit would approach $1.2 trillion — 8.3 percent of the overall economy, the highest since World War II. With the stimulus and other expenses, some analysts say, the annual gap between federal spending and income could reach $2 trillion when the fiscal year ends in September.

Obama proposes to dramatically reduce those numbers, said White House budget director Peter Orszag: “We will cut the deficit in half by the end of the president’s first term.” The plan would keep the deficit hovering near $1 trillion in 2010 and 2011, but shows it dropping to $533 billion by 2013, he said — still high but a more manageable 3 percent of the economy.

To get there, Obama proposes to cut spending and raise taxes. The savings would come primarily from “winding down the war” in Iraq, a senior administration official said. The budget assumes continued spending on “overseas military contingency operations” throughout Obama’s presidency, the official said, but that number is lower than the nearly $190 billion budgeted for Iraq and Afghanistan last year.

Obama also seeks to increase tax collections, mainly by making good on his promise to eliminate some of the temporary tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003. While the budget would keep the breaks that benefit middle-income families, it would eliminate them for wealthy taxpayers, defined as families earning more than $250,000 a year. Those tax breaks would be permitted to expire on schedule in 2011. That means the top tax rate would rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, the tax on capital gains would jump to 20 percent from 15 percent for wealthy filers and the tax on estates worth more than $3.5 million would be maintained at the current rate of 45 percent.

Obama also proposes “a fairly aggressive effort on tax enforcement” that would target corporate loopholes, the official said. And Obama’s budget seeks to tax the earnings of hedge fund managers as normal income rather than at the lower 15 percent capital gains rate.

Overall, tax collections under the plan would rise from about 16 percent of the economy this year to 19 percent in 2013, while federal spending would drop from about 26 percent of the economy, another post-World War II high, to 22 percent.

Look who’s to the right of Congress and the White House!

Gateway Pundit relishes the irony.

Excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence is another possible mistake. True, the state’s increased role in times of crisis is a natural reaction to market setbacks. Instead of streamlining market mechanisms, some are tempted to expand state economic intervention to the greatest possible extent… In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.”

Tony Blankley looks at Barack Obama’s approach to governing, and finds it astonishingly passive and uninvolved. So far, Obama has seemed happy to preside as a sort of non-participant host to the orgy of looting and misrule by his party.

President Obama’s performance at the Gitmo executive order, provided brief but revealing insight into the president’s personal involvement in vital decision making. He had campaigned hard on closing Gitmo. His first public signing as president was that executive order to close it down. The central issue of Gitmo’s closing was and is: What do we do with the dangerous inmates? President Bush kept it open primarily because his administration couldn’t figure out an answer to that question.

Thus, it was breathtaking that at the signing ceremony, President Obama didn’t know how — or even whether — his executive order was dealing with this central quandary.

President Obama: “And we then provide, uh, the process whereby Guantanamo will be closed, uh, no later than one year from now. We will be, uh. … Is there a separate, uh, executive order, Greg, with respect to how we’re going to dispose of the detainees? Is that, uh, written?”

White House counsel Greg Craig: “We’ll set up a process.”

To be at the signing ceremony and not know what he was ordering done with the terrorist inmates is a level of ignorance about equivalent to being a groom at the altar in a wedding ceremony and asking who it is you are marrying.

Steve Gilbert was counting:

1. Make government open and transparent.

2. Make it “impossible” for Congressmen to slip in pork barrel projects.

3. Meetings where laws are written will be more open to the public. (Even Congressional Republicans shut out.)

4. No more secrecy.

5. Public will have 5 days to look at a bill.

6. You’ll know what’s in it.

7. We will put every pork barrel project online.

He had linked a video of the Obamessiah making these promises but YouTube pulled it.

Nicholas Guariglia addresses the rapidly growing commentary meme of Barack Obama’s penchant for broken promises.

What could anyone have possibly expected from a young, overtly leftist Chicago upstart who had accomplished precisely nothing of significance throughout his short career — and yet still promised the world, and more, to his loyal adherents?

Consider his campaign pledges: It wasn’t too long ago that Obama promised to “tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” Ah, the corporate lobbyist, every candidate’s favorite whipping boy. “They have not funded my campaign, they will not run my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I am president,” Barack once swore to his sea of idolizing worshipers.

That was then; this is now. President Obama has allowed seventeen exceptions to the no-lobbyist rule. And remember that “sunlight before signing” pledge, giving citizens enough time to read a bill — and offer their opinions on it — before it is signed into law? Well, that’s gone to the wayside, too.

Consider his tone and lack of bipartisanship: Obama’s election was supposed to end the “politics as usual,” filled with “divisiveness” and all other sorts of bad things. It was on Inauguration Day, as I recall, when Obama proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances … that for far too long have strangled our politics.” We should “set aside childish things,” Obama suggested, and “choose our better history.”

So much for that. The first thing President Obama did was allow Nancy Pelosi to write the egregious “stimulus” bill, effectively making it her own personal wish list. When opposition to the bill began to mount, Obama brought Republicans to the bargaining table — only to snicker “I won” to their faces.

Additionally, President Obama’s recent speech to House Democrats was as snide and sarcastic of a national address as you will ever see. It was laced with flippant, partisan attacks on those who dared to question the logic of this massive bill. His administration went on the offensive, campaign-style, impugning the motives of those who have philosophical problems with the stimulus — what he calls “bickering” — while discarding any semblance of bipartisan spirit or grace under pressure.

Consider the dialogue: Gone is the pie-in-the-sky talk about post-partisan politics, transcending space and time, and all that other nonsense. We just passed a spending bill which will — using contemporary monetary standards — cost more than Bush’s Iraq war and Roosevelt’s New Deal combined. It is, by far, the largest spending bill in American history. We could buy real estate on Mars for a fifth of the cost.

Remember Obama’s promise to the voters of Illinois to serve his full Senate term if elected? Remember Obama’s promise to use federal campaign financing?

Read the whole thing.

WorldNetDaily:

A bookstore in Texas has sparked some comments – and criticisms – for having displayed a number of books about Barack and Michelle Obama under a “Religion” sign in the children’s section of its facility.

It’s a mess, but C. Edmund Wright offers the consolatory reflection that it’s only a matter of time before the consequences of left-liberal policies come home to roost.

There’s a law that liberals always shatter. (And no, I’m not talking about tax law.) It’s the law of unintended consequences. Actually it’s not so much liberals per se that break it so much as it seems liberal thinking by definition always runs afoul of this law. Leftist policy always hangs itself if given enough rope.

The liberals now have the entire stage with a very liberal President, extreme leftists in control of Congress, and the main stream media. Liberal failure has nowhere to hide and no one to hide behind. So as the Obama administration attempts to attack the country’s economic woes, they find themselves stepping in one pile of liberal policy do-do after another. You might say that the left hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. The world will have to watch as liberal policy for problem A destroys Obama goals for problem B and so on.

Read the whole thing.

Charles R. Kesler, in Christian Science Monitor, warns that Barack Obama intends to move America as far in a leftward direction as his predecessors Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

Modern liberalism came to America in three waves, and it’s useful to think of Obama in this light.

The progressives of the early 20th century were the original liberals, developing the essential tenets of liberalism as a political doctrine. Woodrow Wilson and others argued that the Constitution was an 18th-century document, based on 18th-century notions of rights. While suited to its day, they said, it was now painfully inadequate unless interpreted in a vital new spirit.

This spirit was Darwinian and evolutionary, turning Hamilton’s “limited Constitution” into a “living Constitution” that must be able to adapt its structure and function to meet the latest social and economic challenges. To guide this evolution, to organize society’s march into the future, presidents had to cease being merely constitutional officers and become dynamic leaders of popular opinion.

Obama accepts all the major elements of this evolutionary approach to the Constitution and American government. As he wrote in “The Audacity of Hope,” the Constitution “is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.”

Likewise, in his inaugural address he declared, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works….”

This emphasis on what “works” is his nod to pragmatism, which he implies is almost the opposite of ideological liberalism. In fact, however, such pragmatism is part of liberalism.

What “works,” after all, depends on what you think government’s purpose is supposed to be. Pragmatism tries to distract us from those ultimate questions, while assuming liberal answers to them. Thus Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal promised “bold, persistent experimentation.” Obama’s domestic agenda betrays the same eagerness.

Liberalism’s second stage was economic. In the New Deal, the Great Society, and its sequels, liberals turned to the wholesale minting of new kinds of rights. Citizens were thus entitled to socioeconomic benefits through programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Besides these entitlements, the federal government also extended its regulatory authority to areas previously private or under state and local jurisdiction.

But this wave crested unexpectedly, and for a while, contemporary liberals seemingly lost their enthusiasm for such top-down regulation and the work of transforming privileges into rights.

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of socialist economies around the globe, liberals such as Bill Clinton took a second look at the free market. He populated his Treasury department with highfliers from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms. In left-leaning think tanks and even in the academy, capitalism commanded strange new respect. This rehabilitation of the market, though never more than partial, was the greatest change in American liberalism in the past 40 years. Obama absorbed it, as did many members of his new administration.

But the financial crisis and market meltdown have changed things.

It looks like 1932 again, a time for reinvigorated government activism. …

An enduring Democratic majority is not out of the question. The wild scramble to stop the economic and financial downturn may well leave America with a politically controlled economy that would corrupt the relationship between citizens and the federal government – sapping entrepreneurship and encouraging new forms of dependence on the state, as in much of Europe. That would be consistent with the more socialized democracy that liberalism has been striving for ever since the Progressive Era.

Obama likes to emphasize that America is more like the world than we realize, and must become still more like it if the US is to remain the world’s leader. Despite his summoning oratory, his sense of American exceptionalism thus is far less lofty, far more constrained, than Reagan’s or FDR’s. The greatest stumbling block to Obama’s ambition is likely to be the inability of this exceptional president to persuade Americans to follow him into so unexceptional a future.

James Lewis, at American Thinker, admires the scale and enthusiasm of the orgy of looting well underway on the Potomac.

Just before the election, Barack Obama made fifteen references to “pie” in 100 seconds of a speech — all about dividing up that yummy pie of the American economy. His audience laughed and chanted, “Pie! Pie!” to show how hungry they were. In one fell swoop Obama gave away the rapacity of socialism. In his first weeks of his presidency the world has seen how hungry he really is.

Mr. Obama doesn’t look like he has an eating problem, but he is hungry, voraciously hungry. …

Socialism is rapaciously greedy — that’s what endless envy warfare comes down to. The Left likes to preen itself with the word ‘progressive,’ when it is actually the most regressive political strategy in history. The key political move is to seek out the most rapacious people — not hungry for food but power — and use them to mobilize an attack on the productive sector, the milk cows of society. It is the most primitive political strategy ever. It goes back to the Romans and long before. Karl Marx merely reinvented a very old and decrepit wheel.

That is why everything is grist for the mill of Obama Marxism. Old-time Marxism just pitted the poor against the rich — a compelling sympathy play in the 19th century, with grinding poverty, industrial workers living in little better than slavery, and peasant farmers in Europe who were all but slaves, as in Czarist Russia. Then decades of capitalist vitality provided the goods and services for an unprecedented spread of wealth, so that today Joe the Plumber is an instinctive conservative. Industrial workers became prosperous.

So the Left needed a new underclass. That is why the Boomer Left had to find new victim groups — women who could be made to envy men, blacks to envy whites, homosexuals to envy heterosexuals, the young against their parents, each ethnic group against the other. The New Marxism plays off any victim group against any perceived winner.

Barack Obama’s political career began with the winning of an Illinois State Senate seat by taking control of the process and getting all his democrat party opponents (in a one party race) kicked off the ballot. Barack Obama’s career reached its present zenith, at least in part, through other process short cuts like the democrat party’s rules committee awarding him primary delegates from Michigan where he did not run and duplicate registrations and votes courtesy of ACORN.

Newsmax:

The Obama administration is ending the Census Bureau’s traditional autonomy – a move that has Republicans outraged over the White House’s politicization of counting Americans.

Last week, an administration official revealed that the yet-to-be-named director of the Census Bureau will report to the White House rather than Commerce Secretary nominee Judd Gregg, a Republican.

What this move undoubtedly signifies is the Obama Administration’s intention to make an end run around the Constitution’s specification of an “actual enumeration” every decade to permit statistical estimates of non-actually-enumerated democrat constituencies in order to enlarge the congressional representation and budgetary apportionment for inner-city, one-party democrat-controlled districts. The estimating would be done by hardcore democrat party partisans, of course, who can estimate with the best.

Mr. Gregg should never have agreed to accept the Secretary of Commerce appointment in the context of such a cynical and opportunistic partisan manuever.

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UPDATE 2/13:

Senator Judd Gregg announced, very politely, that he was declining the appointment due to “irresolvable conflicts.” Good for him.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford articulates the Republican position on the democrat party Porkulus:

A problem that was created by building up of too much debt will not be solved with yet more debt,” Gov. Mark Sanford said Sunday, making a reference to the federal deficit spending that will likely finance the federal stimulus package.

“We’re moving precipitously close to what I would call a savior-based economy,” Sanford also said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

The South Carolina Republican said such an economy is “what you see in Russia or Venezuela or Zimbabwe or places like that where it matters not how good your product is to the consumer but what your political connection is to those in power.”

“That is quite different than a market-based economy where some rise and some fall but there’s a consequence to making a stupid decision,” Sanford said after pointing to the powers granted to the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve to help deal with the current economic crisis.

“A lot of people who’ve made some very stupid decisions are being bailed out by the population at large,” he added.

Instead of bailing out failing companies, Sanford told CNN’s John King that the government should let the economy work through the current challenges without intervention.

“We’re going to go through a process of deleveraging,” Sanford said. “And it will be painful. The question is: Do we apply a bunch of different band aids that lengthen and prolong this pain or do we take the band aid off? I believe very strongly: let’s get this thing over with, let’s not drag it on.”