Department of Offense

4 Million Jobs: “My bottom line is to make sure that we are saving or creating 4 million jobs.” -Obama is not creating 4 million jobs. According to the Congressional Budget Office, under the most optimistic models Obama’s Trillion Dollar Debt Plan would create only 3.6 million jobs and could produce only 1.2 million jobs. And one in five of these jobs will be a government job.

Spending: “Look, I would love not to have to spend money right now. This notion that somehow I came in here just ginned up to spend $800 billion, that wasn’t — that wasn’t how I envisioned my presidency beginning.” – Obama’s chief of staff exposed this lie when he said;” Never allow a crisis to go to waste…They are opportunities to do big things.” But the bill itself is all the proof you need to know that Obama and his leftist allies thoroughly love their chance to blow a trillion dollars. The Obama Trillion Dollar Debt Plan doubles the size of the Department of Education and creates 32 brand new government programs. Worse, it sneaks in a major down payment on Obama’s health care plan creating the bureaucracy and tracking systems necessary to force socialized medicine on the American people.

Free Lunches: “Once the economy stabilizes and people are less fearful, then I do think that we’re going to have to start thinking about how do we operate more prudently, because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” – Obama’s Trillion Dollar Debt Plan is founded on the belief that government’s can provide endless free lunches to the American people. Does Obama believe the trillions he wants to spend grows on trees? Nobel laureate Gary Becker writes: “There are no free lunches in spending, public or private. The increased federal debt caused by this stimulus package has to be paid for eventually by higher taxes on households and businesses. … The burden from higher taxes down the road has to be deducted both from any short-term stimulus provided by the spending program, and from its long-run effects on the economy.”

Japan: “We saw this happen in Japan in the 1990s, where they did not act boldly and swiftly enough, and as a consequence they suffered what was called the “lost decade” where essentially for the entire ’90s they did not see any significant economic growth.” – This statement is audacity defined. Since 1992 Japan has spent $6.3 trillion in stimulus spending, racking up the largest public debt in the developed world — totaling 180 percent of its $5.5 trillion economy. And this massive borrow-and-spend splurge did nothing to help the economy. And Obama thinks this is evidence in support of his Trillion Dollar Debt Plan?

No wonder support for Obama’s economic stimulus plan is sinking like a rock.

As conservative stalwart Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) writes in today’s Wall Street Journal: “As a nation, we got into this mess by spending and investing money that didn’t exist. We won’t get out of it by doing more of the same.” Coburn is not alone in this assessment. The Washington Post reports today that Senate Democratic leaders have conceded they do not have the votes to pass the stimulus bill as currently written. And it is not just because conservatives like Sen. Coburn object. Moderate Senators Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Susan Collins (R-ME) are also not happy with the core of the Trillion Dollar Debt Plan. Nelson says he and Collins have identified “tens of billions” in cuts they will ask Obama to remove. But Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) had an even more honest assessment of the bill telling the Post that “many of the provisions were jammed into the legislation by members of the Appropriations Committee who were ‘trying to short-circuit the normal legislative process.’” Snowe concluded: “They should scrub it.”

There is an alternative. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has an idea he calls The American Option. Instead of permanently expanding the size and power of Washington, DeMint’s idea would free American entrepreneurs from their stifling tax burdens and allow them to create millions of new private sector jobs. The American Option would create rapid growth in wages and business incomes by reducing business taxes from 35% to 25%; reducing the estate tax to 15%; keeping the tax rates on dividends and capital gains at 15%; reducing individual tax rates to three levels and permanently repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). According to a study by the Center for Data Analysis this policy would increase employment by a half million jobs in 2009 and by 1.3 million jobs in 2010, and create 4.8 million jobs between 2009 and 2012. By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Trillion Dollar Debt Plan will only create 1.2 million to 3.6 million jobs, one in five of which will be a government job.

Commenting on the rapidly shrinking support for the Trillion Dollar Debt Plan, Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) predicted that “100 decisions” will be “made between now and when we deliver the bill to the president’s desk.” Let’s hope our Senator’s choose freedom and small government over Washington control over the economy and trillion dollar deficits for years to come.

	Iran fired its first satellite into orbit Tuesday, proving that once their nuclear program is complete they will have the ability to send warheads halfway around the globe.
	In her first day of intensive diplomacy yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had pointed words about Iranian behavior.
	North Korea has been moving what appear to be components of a long-range missile to a launching site.
	Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) unveiled a set of principles that will guide their efforts to regulate the entire economy in the name of stopping global warming.
	According to Rasmussen Reports, the percentage of Americans who believe Congress is doing a poor job jumped 7 points last week.

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The real problem with Obama’s Trillion Dollar Debt Plan is the permanent new education and health care spending disingenuously passed off as “temporary stimulus.” But all of the non-stimulus line items in the bill make for a more vivid demonstration of what the left is trying to accomplish. The pork in this bill includes: $1 billion for Amtrak, $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for the National Endowment of the Arts; $400 million for global warming research; $2.4 billion for clean coal; $650 million for even more digital TV conversion coupons; $600 million for new government cars; $7 billion for modernizing federal buildings; $150 million for the Smithsonian; $345 million for Agriculture Department computers; $870 million to combat the flu; $400 million to fight STDs; $3 billion for after school programs; $1 billion Community Oriented Policing Services; $1 billion to help states collect child support; $400 million for NASA to compile climate change research; $400 million for the Department of Commerce to fund habitat restoration projects at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and $400 million for the Social Security Administration to replace its computer system.

All of this spending may have merit on its own, but none of it belongs in an economic stimulus bill.

Even the actual infrastructure spending in the bill is rife with leftist priorities that guarantee the money will be wasted instead of creating public goods capable of helping the economy grow. The Trillion Dollar Debt Plan includes $9 billion for expanding broadband to rural areas of the country. But a report last month by Pew shows one in three Americans not currently on the internet have no interest in going on line now regardless of the cost. As the New York Times reports, this makes the Debt Plan’s broadband effort “a $9 billion cyberbridge to nowhere.”

Other popular infrastructure items like school construction are also destined to be wasted. The Milwaukee Public Schools would reap $88.6 million over two years for new construction under the debt plan even though the district has 15 vacant school buildings, a large surplus of property and no plans for new construction. And don’t forget the ‘Buy American’ provisions that big labor is pushing. Not only could they start a Great Depression style trade war, but as Dartmouth professor of economics Doug Irwin demonstrates, they will also add billions in unnecessary construction costs to otherwise cost-effective infrastructure projects.

Obama’s Trillion Dollar Debt Plan is larger than the combined total cost of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The borrowing Obama’s plan requires will shatter post-WW II records for deficit spending. It will more than double the previous debt to G.D.P ratio record set in the 1980s. If all families were asked to equally shoulder the burden of the $819 billion stimulus package, it would be like asking them to take on an amount of debt equivalent to what they spend on food, clothing, and health care or most of what they spend on shelter for an entire year. By even the most optimistic estimates debt-ratios of this size will drive interest rates up by 0.7 and 1.1 percentage points. Such increases in interest rates would significantly weaken the economy further and delay for many months any hope of significant recovery.

For What?
According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest estimates, Obama’s Trillion Dollar Debt Plan will only create 1.2 million to 3.6 million jobs, and most of the jobs would only replace those lost to the recession. It is not just conservatives that see fundamental problems with Obama’s Trillion Dollar Debt Plan. President Bill Clinton’s budget director, Alice Rivlin told the Senate there are two risks with including all of the left’s permanent spending priorities in what is supposed to be an economic stimulus bill: “One is that money will be wasted because the investment elements were not carefully crafted. The other is that it will be harder to return to fiscal discipline as the economy recovers if the longer run spending is not offset by reductions or new revenues.”

As we showed above, this bill is rife with “not carefully crafted” spending that will be wasted. And the leftist elements in control of Congress have no track record of reducing spending. By their own criteria, Obama’s Trillion Dollar Debt Plan is destined to fail. But if you don’t trust us, here is what John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1942:
Organized public works, at home and abroad, may be the right cure for a chronic tendency to a deficiency of effective demand. But they are not capable of sufficiently rapid organization (and above all cannot be reversed or undone at a later date), to be the most serviceable instrument for the prevention of the trade cycle.

QUICK HITS

	The New York Times editorial board believes HHS nominee Tom Daschle ought to step aside and let the president choose a less-blemished successor.
	According to the New York Times, when faced with a clash between campaign rhetoric on lobbyist influence and Washington reality, Mr. Obama has proved willing to compromise.
	A group of about 55 Democrats are imploring their leadership in the House to change controversial rules intended to bypass deliberative committee hearings and amendments.
	Thousands of union members will flood the Capitol Wednesday pushing for a bill that would make it much easier for workers to unionize.
	The staggering number of journalists leaving their jobs to become Democratic staff proves yet again how biased the mainstream media is.

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