When Fiscal Insanity & Incompetence is Your Sales Pitch

What is the biggest knock on Barack Obama's presidency thus far?

His out of control spending.

So how is the president going to push his Big Government Knows All health care plan?

By citing out of control spending.

No kidding.

This is so outrageous that it deserves a good Fisking. Here's what he said in New Mexico today, plus commentary:

May 14 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending “unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries. “We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

All of this is true. (The best lies are coated with truth, like rancid hot dogs slipped into buns of fresh, wholesome goodness.) The deficit spending is unsustainable. In fact, China has already begun ignoring our 30-year Treasury offerings in favor of the short-term stuff. The interest on our debt will soon come to over $1 trillion a year, which even we and our kids together can't pay off.

Holders of U.S. debt will eventually “get tired” of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. “It will have a dampening effect on our economy.”

That's what fiscal conservatives of all stripes have been hollering since last fall, the cries of which the president has turned a deaf ear. Suddenly he's a true believer? He not only refused to hear these arguments when the stimulus bills were before Congress, he said there wasn't enough time to even discuss the issue (or read the legislation).

The president pledged to work with Congress to shore up entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare and said he was confident that the House and Senate would pass health-care overhaul bills by August. “Most of what is driving us into debt is health care, so we have to drive down costs,” he said.

Now we are getting into Fairy Tale Land, the land of the Midnight Mendacity and the Lie at High Noon.

What is driving us into debt is Big Government, run by Big Progressives like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, George W. Bush, Tim Geithner, Hank Paulson, Ben Bernacke, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, John Murtha, John McCain, et al. In fact, there are very damn few people in government right now who seem to "get it." You cannot run budget $1.8 Trillion budget deficits, four times last year's "monster," and survive.

But health care is not the culprit. Most people are paying their health care premiums. Most private health insurers are doing just fine. Doctors and hospitals are making money. Pharmacists and pharmacies, plugging right along.

Who isn't doing well? Government-run health care, Medicare. It's a mess. It's always been a mess, and Part D, introduced in 2004, made it worse. In fact, every time the government intrudes itself into health care, the situation gets worse.

Yes, there are people who don't have health insurance. By law they cannot be turned away at emergency rooms, and to emergency rooms they do go. Just ask someone who works there. Yet many of these people are in transition. They do not have health insurance now. They will at some later point.

The point is: You do not wreck the best health care system in the world by turning it over to the one organization -- the federal government -- that has proven totally inept at running even a fraction of it. You don't wreck the health care of all 300 million Americans so that you can feel good about giving crappy health care to 40 million.

Barack Obama knows this. He doesn't care.

He's awfully glib with the Big Lie. He created the very conditions of runaway deficit spending and collapsing currency that he is now trumpeting as the need for taking over 14 percent of the American economy.

This is shameless.

And evil.

And if you are stupid enough to believe the lies without checking out the facts, you deserve what is coming to you.