Another Broken Promise Of The Presidential Campaign

According to the Democrats this was going to be a different kind of President. Hope and change and government transparency were all coming to reform the process in Washington D.C. Those evil lobbyists were all being thrown out and government transparency was coming in.

That was before the new administration hired more than eighteen lobbyists and tried to nominate several tax cheaters to serve in the cabinet. In fact, after last weeks dubious vote that passed the economic stimulus bill, the campaign slogan of hope and change should be replaced by the slogan, Government deficit spending and dubious Beltway lobbyists - just more of the same.

I'm often amused that people are amazed that politicians make promises they don't keep. Of course, politicians do it for votes and some campaign promises do grab the voters imagination. Some are even moved to tears at the rhetoric of the campaign rally. Still others want to vote for the candidate that they think is going to improve their lives.

Its all a part of the public intoxication of the Presidential election campaign. The truth is that despite all the talk of change, the reality is that only the political Parties change and a new group of Washington insiders grab power while politics inside the beltway remains unchanged.

The latest broken promise of the current administration is obvious if you watched the final debate of the 2008 Presidential campaign. In that debate, Barack Obama sought to portray himself as a fiscal conservative to attract the independent, fiscally conservative voter on election day. In response to a question about the one trillion dollar deficit the country faced, Obama would tell Bob Schieffer that he was a strong proponent of "pay as you go".

"Every dollar that I have proposed, I've proposed an additional cut so that it matches." Obama told Schieffer that his oversight of the federal budget deficit would include every government program. Anyone that watched the debate, probably remembers that Obama sound bite, since it was widely reported by the media. Obama said: "We need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don't work. And I want to go through the federal budget line by line, page by page, programs that don't work, we should cut. Programs that we need, we should make them work better".

So, if anyone believed the Presidents concern last October about out of control government spending and the one trillion dollar federal budget deficit, they will be certainly be disappointed in the passage of the economic stimulus package last week. However, the problem was not just the billions of dollars of wasteful spending that will not create jobs or stimulate the economy in the bill itself. No, it was also the way the bill passed through Congress in haste as the President pressured Congressional politicians by talking about a "catastrophe" and comparing the economy to the Great Depression of 1930's fame.

It is certainly hard to believe that the man that only four months ago promised to go through the federal budget "line by line and page by page" did not give the same consideration to what was the largest appropriations bill in the country's history. In fact, the eleven hundred page stimulus bill was not completed until the middle of night prior to the vote. So, few in Congress woud actually even read the bill prior to their vote.

Of course, the real cost of the bill will be much higher than the mainstream media is currently reporting. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated the impact of permanently extending the 20 most popular provisions of the stimulus bill. The CBO calculated that without any future fiscal restraint, the true cost in the next decade of the stimulus bill will balloon to $2.527 trillion in spending with another $744 billion cost in debt servicing. The total taxpayer bill for this legislation will be $3.27 trillion.

A "line by line and page by page" budget review sounded like a great way to address record budget deficits during the final debate in last Presidential election campaign. However, a 3.27 trillion dollar spending bill passed through Congress in haste, without transparency and without any spending offset is really just another broken political promise made during the last Presidential campaign.

http://www.eworldvu.com