
 |
|
May 24, 2013
May 22, 2013
John Thorne:
They launched the 'Arab Spring' but now yearn for the good old days of a strongman
May 20, 2013
Richard A. Serrano: Is Meir Kahane's assassin now a changed man?
Melissa Healy: Genetic copies of living people from embryos no longer science fiction
Jewz in the Newz by Nate Bloom : Jews Inducted into Rock Hall of Fame; Anton Yelchin co-stars in New "Trek" film; Kutcher (but not Kunis) visits Israel; Jewish TV Star Praises Jewish Rap Star
The Kosher Gourmet by Cathy Pollak: WARNING: This WALNUT CAKE WITH PRALINE FROSTING, perfect for afternoon coffee, is addicting
May 13, 2013
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Why the giving of the document that would permanently change the world could only be done in desolation
David G. Savage: Church-state, literally? Supreme Court weighing public school graduation in a church
May 10, 2013
Rabbi Berel Wein: Be all that you should be
May 8, 2013
Peter Ford: Why China is welcoming both Israel's Netanyahu and Palestinians' Abbas
Warren Richey: Obama administration quietly backs out of appeal over new contraceptive mandate
Fred Weir: At Kerry-Putin meeting, US-Russia relations thaw --- a tad
The Kosher Gourmet by Leela Cyd Ross : Almost too pretty to eat, this colorful salad with Sicilian inspiration will tickle the taste buds and delight your visual sensibility
May 6, 2013
May 3, 2013
Kids, kittens the Same? With employee perks at struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo! it's hard to tell
Sandy Kleffman: Artificial kidney offers hope to patients tethered to a dialysis machine
April 29, 2013
Roy Gutman: Poland's new Jewish museum celebrates life, doesn't revisit Holocaust
Mark Clayton: Terrorism in America: Is US missing a chance to learn from failed plots?
Kim Murphy: Boston Bomber's 'Svengali' Revealed
Pete Spotts: Tiny satellites + cellphones = cheaper 'eyes in the sky' for NASA
April 26, 2013
Clifford D. May: Defense in the Age of Jihadist Terrorism
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: How to feel your best -- with plenty of energy, a healthy weight and optimal mental and physical function -- without driving yourself batty
April 24, 2013
|
| |
Jewish World Review
Feb 20, 2012/ 27 Shevat, 5772
Gobbledegook galore: How to have fun on a budget
By
Paul Greenberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
"The more the plans fail, the more the planners plan."
-- Ronald Reagan
It's hard o imagine how anyone can take President Obama's latest budget seriously, including President Obama. After all, he's an intelligent man. He can recognize 2,000-plus pages of gobbledegook in the guise of a budget, especially if he's the one who's rolling it out like the latest model hula-hoop from Wham-O Inc. What fun. But nothing more.
How is this president's budget less than serious?
Let us count the ways, or at least begin counting them. For there may be no end to the ways this budget piles on debt in the name of economizing, hinders the country's economic recovery in the name of helping it, and generally lays traps for the unwary.
Happily, the tricks are so transparent there's little doubt anybody will be fooled. We're all wary of government numbers by now. And there's no hiding the fact that, for the fourth straight year, this president has failed to keep his promise to cut the federal deficit at least in half by the end of his first term.
Instead, he's run up another trillion-dollar deficit this year and his budget projects one almost that large ($956 billion) for next year. And next year's deficit, like this year's, could easily top the administration's rosy-hued projections.
It's enough to make the innocent taxpayer wonder why the president bothers to submit a budget at all. Since he's just going to keep on doing what he's been doing for the last four years: Spend, spend, and, when all that spending doesn't produce the desired results, spend more.
Why draw up a budget that has so little relation to reality? Because the president is obliged to submit one, even if it's nine parts fiction to one part wishful thinking. The formalities must be observed. And this budget is only a formality.
All those deficits add up -- in this administration's case to an additional $5 trillion of national debt accumulated in just one presidential term. That's got to be a record, but records are, yes, made to be broken. Just wait till his second term. Barack Obama may only have begun to spend. Spending is his substitute for an economic policy.
When times are bad, as they have been, this president's response has been to spend. When times are a little better, as they have been of late, his response is the same and more of it: keep spending. The day of reckoning will never come; government can just keep taxing and borrowing and spending, then repeat.
The economy may change, but not this president's approach to it. He's like a doctor with only one prescription -- Spend! -- and when the patient still fails to thrive, Dr. Obama just rachets up the dosage.

The possibility that the patient might recover on his own, if just given the chance, never seems to occur to the doc. He is forever fiddling with the struggling American economy, poking it here and jiggling it there, prescribing everything except what it may need most: a good leaving-alone. Especially now that the economy is showing the first signs of recovery.
But our economist-in-chief just won't be still. He's always got more taxes to impose, more stimuless (sic) programs to propose. And the more he taxes and spends, the more unstable the economy seems, and the less certain its prospects.

The administration's theories about the economy would work out beautifully if not for people. Contrary bunch, they keep going their own way, making their own decisions, and generally making a hash of the president's projections.
Somehow unemployment never fell to less than 8 percent, but actually rose on this president's watch. Despite his grand designs and sophisticated economic policies. ("The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." --Friedrich Hayek.)
But with the determination of a true believer, this president presses on. Every time he loses a bet on this roulette wheel of an economy, he just doubles down on debt. How can he lose? Every time one stimulus fails to stimulate, he comes up with another. He's nothing if not game, so long as the money is somebody else's.
It was Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady herself, who pointed out the big problem with such a happy theory: Eventually the spenders run out of other people's money. Which is another reason it's hard to imagine how anyone can take President Obama's latest budget seriously, including President Obama. After all, he's an intelligent man. Surely he can see through himself.
Paul Greenberg Archives
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Send your comments by clicking here.
include "/home/jwreview/public_html/t-ssi/jwr_squaread_300x250.php";
if (strpos(, "printer_friendly") === 0)
{}
else {
=<<
© 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
|
|

Arnold Ahlert
Mitch Albom
Jay Ambrose
Michael Barone
Barrywood
Lori Borgman
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Richard Z. Chesnoff
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
Christine Flowers
Frank J. Gaffney
Bernie Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Argus Hamilton
Victor Davis Hanson
Betsy Hart
Ron Hart
Nat Hentoff
A. Barton Hinkle
Jeff Jacoby
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
Ch. Krauthammer
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Ann McFeatters
Dale McFeatters
Dana Milbank
Jeanne Moos
Dick Morris
Jim Mullen
Deroy Murdock
Judge A. Napolitano
Bill O'Reilly
Clarence Page
Kathleen Parker
Star Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Sharon Randall
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Heather Robinson
Debra J. Saunders
Martin Schram
Greg Schwem
Culture Shlock
David Shribman
Roger Simon
Lenore Skenazy
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Ben Stein
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Dan Thomasson
Bob Tyrrell
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Byron York
ZeitGeist
Mort Zuckerman

Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Baloo
Lisa Benson
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
John Branch
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
Matt Davies
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Glenn Foden
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Walt Handelsman
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holbert
David Horsey
Lee Judge
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Chan Lowe
Jimmy Margulies
Jack Ohman
Michael Ramirez
Rob Rogers
Drew Sheneman
Kevin Siers
Jeff Stahler
Scott Stantis
Danna Summers
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters
Dan Wasserman

Tech Q&A
Mr. Know-It-All
Ask Doctor K
Richard Lederer
Frugal Living
On Nutrition
Bookmark These
Bruce Williams
|