Beware presidents bemoaning Greeks. According to news reports, President Obama will attack the recently-passed House budget resolution in a speech today:
This Congressional Republican budget, however, is something different altogether. It’s a Trojan Horse. Disguised as deficit-reduction plan, it’s really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.
Really.
Let’s begin with the merits. The “Ryan budget” is just that: a budget — something the president’s party cannot find time to do. And just what is that “radical vision?” Under the Ryan budget, spending, or the government’s size as a share of GDP is a little above 20 percent over ten years. Guess what the 50-year average of spending as a size of GDP is? A bit over 20 percent. Radical visions indeed.
The Ryan budget contains fundamental tax reform — something the president talks about while actually littering the code with temporary, targeted, special-interest tax breaks and crony-capitalism subsidies.
#more#The Ryan budget takes on fundamental reforms of broken entitlement programs, thereby ensuring that they survive for the next generation of seniors and low-income Americans and stems the flow of red ink that threatens another downgrade of U.S. finances. The president has run four years of trillion-dollar deficits and has yet to produce a budget that contains an iota of these needed reforms — even after being handed a blueprint by his personally appointed fiscal-reform commission.
Despite this, the president goes on to assert, “And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last — education and training; research and development — it’s a prescription for decline.” The president’s beloved big-government programs have produced pathetic growth thus far and will protect no American when the furies of international capital markets descend on a debt-ridden United States. Perhaps he should look at, uh, Greece.
But at least the president has a sense of irony.
After all, Obamacare remains the greatest Trojan Horse in modern memory.
During the 13-month legislative Odyssey that forced Obamacare into law, the president related one admittedly sad tale after another of that small minority of Americans with pre-existing conditions struggling to find insurance coverage. There was bipartisan agreement that this was an area in need of attention.
So what do we get instead?
We get a 2,700-page bill that required arcane parliamentary tactics to pass through the nation’s gates. And hidden within was over $2.6 trillion in new federal expenditures, new burdens on employers, an unconstitutional mandate, hundreds of billions in new taxes, and a massive expansion of Medicaid.
So what was cleverly disguised as a way to deal with a tiny minority of Americans with pre-existing conditions, ultimately just explodes the federal budget, damages economic growth, tramples religious freedoms, and circumvents the Constitution. The Greeks had nothing on Obamacare.