Say Anything Blog

But don’t worry.  It’s not politics as usual because Obama says so.

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — A fired-up Barack Obama ditched his TelePrompter to rally House Democrats and rip Republican opponents of his recovery package Thursday night – at one point openly mocking the GOP for failing to follow through on promises of bipartisanship.

In what was the most pointedly partisan speech of his young presidency, Obama rejected Republican arguments that massive spending in the $819 billion stimulus bill that passed the House should be replaced by a new round of massive tax cuts.

“I welcome this debate, but we are not going to get relief by turning back to the same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin,” said President Obama – sounding more like Candidate Obama than at any time since he took the oath of office less than a month ago.

Obama, speaking to about 200 House Democrats at their annual retreat at the Kingsmill Resort and Spa, dismissed Republican attacks against the massive spending in the stimulus.

“What do you think a stimulus is?” Obama asked incredulously. “It’s spending — that’s the whole point! Seriously.”

Click the link to see humorous, teleprompter-free Obama herky-jerk his way through some tax cut bashing.

But as for Obama’s suggestion that stimulus is spending, let me say this: Government spending is burden.  Burden we taxpayers have to carry.  And further burdening the taxpayers is not, in any way, going to stimulate economic growth.

Think about it this way: How is Obama’s stimulus spending spree going to be paid for?  In order to spend $900 billion to create/save 4,000,000 jobs (at a cost of $225,000/job) as Obama suggests, the money must first come from somewhere.  Which means we either raise taxes substantially (a bad, bad idea in a time of recession) or we borrow the money.  Thus exploding our already out of control national debt.  Which will eventually be tax burden anyway because, at some point, we really are going to have to start paying the debt down.

The more we add to it now, the more our children and grand children will have to pay.

So how is that stimulus?

Obama can mug for the camera and make smug comments about how everyone knows that stimulus means spending (watch the video at the link), but just because Obama says it’s true doesn’t mean it is true.

He really does seem to be letting this messiah stuff go to his head.