Obama’s Address
I promised to do a post when I found the transcript of Obama’s address to the US Congress. Well I found it so here we go. In my last post I mentioned how Obama promised to half the federal deficit by the end of this first term. He claims his administration has already started to go through the budget line by line to eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs. According to my recent glance at wikipedia the national deficit was $455 billion. A trillion dollars according to Obama (I’m assuming he is considering the addition of TARP). Who knows what it will be at the end of 2009 with the way the current government is spending like there is no tomorrow.
He mentions eliminating education programs that don’t work, or stopping payments to agribusinesses (notice he doesn’t mention eliminating farm subsidies altogether) and of course stopping cold-war era weapons programs. Even if he finds ways in reducing the federal deficit that much, it is only a drop in the bucket in what really needs to be done. The federal dept tops $10 trillion, even if he halves the 1 trillion, we will be back at where we were last year. This isn’t even considering the $50 that government is obligated to pay in social security and Medicare/Medicaid in the next 40 years. This isn’t changing anything. The government is still broke, and the only reason it continues to function is with it’s ability to print as much money as it wants and since it continues to convince foreign countries like China that investing in US bonds is a good idea. This shouldn’t be so hard to fix, I can go to www.federalbudget.com and start knocking useless chunks right off that will eliminate the debt instantly.
He then goes on to exclaim how he is proud to have passed the “recovery plan” free of earmarks, as if he is actually part of the legislature that passed the bill, and as if the whole bill wasn’t just a bunch of wasteful spending. A bunch of bridges to nowhere, and useless hole digging jobs, may temporarily stimulate the given industry but it won’t increase production of wealth which is the only real way to get out of this mess. If the spending keeps increasing the way it has been he should have quite the time halving the federal deficit.
