In the Washington Times, James Bovard takes a look at how DC would have us believe that they’re suffering greatly at the hands of unreasonable people. To paraphrase Nancy Pelosi: We’ve already cut all the far to the bone. There’s nothing left to cut!
And yet:
Federal spending has soared by almost 20 percent since 2008. Yet, to hear Mr. Obama, one would think federal employees are forced to sell pencils on Constitution Avenue to raise funds to finance their bureaucratic salvation missions.
The president whoops up new federal outlays as the panacea for every real and imagined ill the nation faces. He wants $75 billion over the next decade to bankroll universal preschool for 4-year-olds — despite a stack of federal audits proving Head Start is a bust. Mr. Obama wants $60 billion to provide free community college education for all Americans regardless of how federal funding has already spawned endless bureaucratization and strangling mandates on college campuses. Mr. Obama wants $5 billion for start-up funding for technology manufacturing despite the abysmal record of his “green tech” bankruptcy spree early in his presidency.
Rather than hard evidence of successful interventions, the Obama team hustles one multiplier after another to supposedly prove that federal spending boosts the economy. Obama administration officials claimed that the 2009 stimulus would produce $1.57 in economic activity for each dollar spent, that food stamps generate $1.84 in economic activity per dollar of handouts, and that each dollar of unemployment benefits produces $2 in economic activity. And every purported “multiplier” effect is treated as a revealed truth that can vindicate any federal outlay.
Though the federal debt has increased by almost $7 billion since Mr. Obama office, the president hectored in his anti-austerity speech: “America can’t afford being shortsighted, and I’m not going to allow it.” He simply ignores how the soaring debtload will be a financial ball and chain on the young people he claims to cherish and undercut American growth for decades to come.
