President Obama is calling for dramatic defense cuts that could threaten our national survival while obstructing structural reforms to our entitlement programs that are essential for our national financial survival. It just doesn't get much worse than this.
President George W. Bush attempted in good faith to reform Social Security, and Democrats savaged him. Rep. Paul Ryan proposed a comprehensive financial plan that would, as painlessly as possible, restore national fiscal sanity, and Obama and his Democrats have misrepresented the plan (saying it would end Medicare) and used class warfare and fear-mongering to kill it in the cradle.
Indeed, Republicans have repeatedly submitted and passed comprehensive and detailed budget plans to restore our financial solvency, and Senate Democrats have blocked every one of them. Meanwhile, the Democratic Senate hasn't produced a budget in almost three years. Three years!
It is undeniable, undebatable, irrefutable, inarguable and certain that the United States is spending at a level that will destroy it. It is equally indisputable that Democrats have shown no willingness to join Americans in tackling the problem.
Every time you confront a liberal with these incontrovertible facts, his response is not: "You are simply wrong." It is, "Bush started this." Well, Bush did spend too much, but he was a piker compared with Obama. But it doesn't much matter who caused it anymore, does it?
If your family is facing a serious problem, is your first instinct to blame the culprit — other than to identify it for purposes of devising a solution — or to address the problem?
If Democrats truly believe Bush spent too much, then shouldn't they cooperate to bring spending under control rather than use Bush's spending as an excuse to up the ante? While Bush spent too much, including on education and his prescription drug entitlement, Democrats thought he didn't spend nearly enough on education (Ted Kennedy constantly derided Bush over it), and part of the reason Bush advanced prescription drugs was to prevent Democrats from implementing a far costlier package.
If Democrats had any concern about spending, they wouldn't have crammed through Obamacare, which will increase the federal health care budget obscenely. If they had the slightest concern about our upside-down national balance sheet, they wouldn't have spent $900 billion in a worthless, corrupt, ineffectual "stimulus" program and be clamoring for another one. They wouldn't urinate federal money into dead-end green projects, such as Solyndra. They wouldn't have desperately tried to pass a monumentally wasteful cap-and-trade bill that wouldn't have made a dent in global temperature in a hundred years, even if you blindly accept all the superstitious nonsense the environmentalists propagate.
Seriously, people, let Democrats and Obama defenders obfuscate all they want, but have you seen the charts? Have you noticed the dramatic acceleration in spending and deficits since Obama took office? Have you seen the side-by-side comparisons of America's financial future under the Ryan plan and Obama's current spending trajectory? Democrats cannot make Obama's financial path sustainable simply by blaming Bush for what happened before. We have to get about the business of cutting spending and reforming entitlements now because every year we wait, our problems are compounded and become that much more difficult to reverse.
We must come to terms with the fact that Democrats are trying not to control domestic spending — and growth-stifling tax hikes won't substantially reduce the deficit, much less the debt. Everything they are about depends on continually increasing spending, and you see it in their every budget. The only plans that even hint at spending cuts (actually reductions in spending increases using baseline budgeting) are the unspecified ones Obama outlines in his speeches. His actual budgets show no appreciable cuts in the deficits as far as the eye can see. Why aren't people, even Democrats, freaking out over this? I'll never understand this.
Obama is now proposing drastic cuts in our defense budget at a time when global terrorism is on the rise and other nations — from China to Russia to Iran to North Korea, most of whom mean us harm — are aggressively increasing their defense budgets. We are sharing nuclear secrets with Russia and sending technology to China that can be used for military purposes. Our war game projections show we might lose a conventional war against China over a disputed Taiwan Strait. We have killed our F-22 Raptor, while China and Russia are ramping up their next-generation fighters.
Obama's motto seems to be this: If spending is called for by the Constitution, bleed it dry; if the Constitution forbids it, no holds barred. Gut nation-saving defense spending; increase nation-destroying domestic spending.
When will the whole nation wake up to this madness?
David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His latest book, "Crimes Against Liberty," was No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction for its first two weeks. Follow him on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at www.davidlimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
