It’s the President, Stupid

By John Ransom

Thursday, March 06, 2014

Our Demander-in-Chief has once again put together a budget so mind boggling stupid, so bereft of credibility that it will spontaneously abort somewhere between the White House and the desk of Senator Harry Reid (D-Who Me?).

You can think of Obama’s newest budget as the “legitimate rape” of America.

All you really need to know about the budget is this headline from the Washington Post’s Wonk Blog: “Obama budget seeks new spending, new taxes to boost economy, tame debt”.

Ha, ha, ha. Stop me if you heard that one before.

If we gave the government a buck for every time we heard THAT one, we’d have a $17.5 trillion dollar deficit. Oh, wait….

Calorie free spending? In one great soda? Who could be against that?

Democrats and Republicans, that’s who should be.

This might be one of those Obama joke-shop budgets that once again get zero votes in Congress.

It is, after all, an election year. And that might be the point of the budget.

The House could go 435 to zip against it, and I doubt very much Harry Reid (D-Where’d I Leave My Pen?) will even let it get to the Senate floor.

And then Democrats in the House can say they voted against more spending and more taxes. And Democrats in the Senate can make up whatever lie they think will wash in Peoria.

But so what? The damage has already been done by Obama’s de facto budgets.

Because today we have $251 billion dollars in interest payments on our national debt, at a time when interest rates are at all-time lows. That’s about the size of the defense spending for China and Russia combined. That’s more than the defense spending for the next top four countries combined.

Click here to listen to Ransom Notes Radio live or for archives of previous shows.

Currently the interest rate on the benchmark ten-year Treasury Note is 2.71 percent. The Congressional Budget Office says that they think by 2018 the interest rate on the ten year Treasury Notes will be at 5 percent.

That affects interest payments on the national debt.

“Net interest payments by the federal government are also projected to grow rapidly,” says the CBO, “climbing from 1.3 percent of GDP in 2014 to 3.3 percent in 2024, mostly because of the return of interest rates to more typical levels,” as we see in the Treasury note market.

If that’s true, then after Social Security and Obamacare, interest on the national debt will be the single biggest line item on the budget, near $600 billion or more—depending on how much the economy grows-- and that’s more than the defense spending for the top eight countries-- after the United States-- combined.

That’s $8,000 dollars worth of interest payments for a family of four… every, single year.

And what will we have to show for it?

Nothing.

At least during World War II we liberated a few countries along the way.

Today, not only can’t we free ourselves form the cycle of debt, we can’t even protect the Ukraine from a country that spends 15 percent of what we do on national defense. While we fly technically sophisticated drones, Russia has soldiers who march to battle in tennis shoes.

We can’t even build the Keystone Pipeline, the biggest no-brainer decision in the history of Obama’s presidency-- which the president has gotten wrong every single time.

What is this?

Like the sixth time he’s not been able to make up his mind about building a pipeline for oil that’s already traveling on freight cars far more dangerously?

Obama came to Washington as a supposed outsider who would change the way Washington works.

Not only has he failed to do that, he become the epitome of the Washington insider, cutting special interest deals, proposing budgets and passing the buck on private sector job creation all in the name of squalid politics.

Well there’s an election year now, and politics will get more squalid, so I’d like to remind Obama’s enablers on both the right and the left: It’s the president, stupid.

Or better yet, it’s the stupid president.

Be warned.