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In this issue
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review April 1, 2009 / 7 Nissan 5769

The Ship Is Sinking: Quick, Add Water

By Mona Charen


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Let's imagine that President Obama decides to go help out in Fargo, N.D., where they are experiencing floods. Mr. Obama enters the home of a flooded family. The water is already 6 inches high in the living room. The president produces a fire hose and begins to douse the room with even more water. "What are you doing?" cry the anguished homeowners. The president fixes them with one of his impatient looks and explains "May I remind you that I inherited this flood?"


President Obama has reminded us countless times that he inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit. Even if he were about to propose the most responsible, prudent, visionary budget imaginable, that complaint would still be petulant and unseemly. But considering what Obama's own spending will do to the deficit, it's jaw-droppingly galling. He now proposes to increase that deficit to $7 trillion in 10 years. And that $7 trillion is probably a low estimate (the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will be $2.3 trillion higher). When the new spending for programs like Pell Grants, education for handicapped children and so forth comes up for renewal in a few years, Congress is not going to let it lapse. So, to review, it was terrible for President Bush and the Democratic Congress (the president neglects to mention them) to saddle him with all this debt. His answer is to triple it. That's showing 'em!


Some cynics insist that Democrats only decry spending they dislike (such as on the military) and Republicans only deprecate spending they dislike (such as on welfare). There's a germ of truth in this — but only a germ. In the first place, a significant number of Republicans chastise other Republicans for failing to live up to their lean government principles. And some Republicans are honest enough to criticize spending their party generally favors. John McCain, for example, has been a scourge of Pentagon contractors. It's hard to think of a comparably positioned Democrat who has targeted waste, fraud, or abuse in social service programs or education spending.


Even taking account of the Democrats' traditional love of lavish government programs, the current gusher quite takes your breath away. In just the first two months of his term, President Obama has proposed the largest increase in federal spending since World War II. If his budget in enacted, the national debt will be close to 100 percent of GDP in nine years. The Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate is massively increasing government debt at the same time that individuals are struggling to reduce their private debt. So Mr. and Mrs. Jones are cutting back on meals out at restaurants, new clothes, new cars, and fancy cell phones, while the government is going into deep debt on their behalf to pay for windmills, universal preschool, and lots of new transfer payments dressed up as "making work pay." In other words, the state is taking decisions about how much debt Mr. and Mrs. Jones will incur out of their hands. The Joneses will have to pay back the debt some time (or their children will), but they will not be paying off their own purchases or their kids' college educations. Instead they will be paying for the Democrats' dream agenda. As the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore notes, "Most of the money that has been borrowed since September 2008 has been used to bail out irresponsible borrowers, failed financial institutions and car companies, and for expansions of welfare programs. ... Any unbiased assessment of the return on investment ... for these programs would find dismally low payoffs for taxpayers."


The sheer size of this proposed debt is making even Europeans quake. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has three times declined the urging of Obama administration officials to mimic America's debt spree. Some Europeans are even becoming role models for Republicans. As Veronique de Rugy reports in National Review Online, Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., introduced an amendment "to ensure that the budget of the Federal Government is put on a sustainable path by prohibiting consideration of a budget resolution that does not meet the minimum standard of budgetary discipline as defined by the Treaty on European Union (the Maastricht Treaty): a budget deficit no larger than 3 percent of GDP and government debt no larger than 60 percent of GDP." The amendment was rejected.


Sen. Gregg, nobody's idea of an hysteric, is profoundly worried: "... if you take all the debt of our country run up by all of our presidents from George Washington through George W. Bush, the total debt over all those 200-plus years since we started as a nation, it is President Obama's plan to double that debt in just the first five years that he is in office."


To quote the theme song of the TV show "Monk," "If you paid attention, you'd be worried, too."

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