by Hans Bader
November 03, 2009 @ 6:53 pm
It’s been a year since the president was elected, and he’s already piled up an impressive list of lies and broken promises.
The broken promises include his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, and his promise not to sign bills without first giving the public five days of notice.
The Congressional Budget Office says that Obama’s proposed budgets will explode the national debt through massive spending increases, increasing the already large deficits…
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by Hans Bader
October 05, 2009 @ 11:39 am
Unemployment has risen to 9.8 percent, a 26-year high.
That’s much higher than the Obama administration predicted unemployment would rise, if Congress had refused to pass his $800 billion stimulus package. The administration claimed unemployment would rise to 8 percent without a stimulus.
Small businesses are finding it more difficult than ever to borrow badly needed money to meet their payrolls. New financial regulations backed by the administration are contributing to a terrible credit crunch. Meanwhile, the wealthy Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs, perhaps the…
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by Hans Bader
August 08, 2009 @ 12:52 pm
The federal budget deficit has already risen by $880 billion to an unprecedented $1.3 trillion. Most of the increase is attributable to recent increases in federal spending, including Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy in “the long run,” and which ended welfare reform, destroyed thousands of jobs in the export sector, and substituted welfare for productive investments.
Ironically, Obama had campaigned on a promise, since broken, to make a “net spending cut” in…
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by Hans Bader
July 01, 2009 @ 10:39 am
Not content with repealing welfare reform through the job-killing stimulus package, and proposing a massive marriage penalty in the tax code, Obama and his Congressional allies are now planning to make married and widowed taxpayers subsidize benefits for which they are not eligible, such as payments to households with out-of-wedlock births. For example, they are pushing a bill that will allow even households that receive tens of thousands of dollars a year in child support to demand food stamps.
“With support from President Obama, Senator…
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by Hans Bader
June 25, 2009 @ 12:18 pm
Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package was purged of most investments in roads and bridges, and filled instead with welfare and social spending, out of political correctness, after feminist leaders complained that building and repairing roads and bridges would put unemployed blue-collar men to work, rather than women.
Christina Hoff Sommers points out that “of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. . . .Men are bearing the brunt of the current…
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by Hans Bader
June 20, 2009 @ 2:56 pm
Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package is now being used to force states to adopt racial quotas in government contracts, even if their state constitution or civil-rights laws forbid such quotas. Slate’s Mickey Kaus reports that “CalTrans, the huge state agency that spends billions in federal highway construction funds, ’sets a quota of having 6.75 percent of contracts go to women or members of a targeted group–African American, Asian-Pacific American, and Native American.’”
The stimulus package also repealed welfare reform, as Kaus and…
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by Hans Bader
June 14, 2009 @ 4:23 pm
Rapidly-rising Medicare spending already threatens “to crush the federal budget,” and much Medicare spending is wasteful, yet the Obama Administration claims it can somehow save money by creating Medicare-like programs to cover all Americans. In the New York Times, economics professor Tyler Cowan calls it “the new voodoo economics.” Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson concludes that Obama’s health-care plan “is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three.”
Obama is firing an inspector general who exposed wrongdoing by one of his supporters, and previously…
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by Hans Bader
March 08, 2009 @ 6:26 pm
Federal bailouts and related spending proposed by the Obama Administration now total 8 trillion dollars, according to the American Institute for Economic Research.
To pay for exploding federal spending, Obama’s Congressional allies are mulling huge tax increases. Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Cal.) wants a 90 percent tax rate. Obama has spent more in his first 50 days, by far, than George Bush spent on the entire Iraq War. That includes a pork-filled $800 billion stimulus package that deceptively repealed welfare reform, and that the…
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by Hans Bader
October 17, 2008 @ 12:32 pm
Senator Barack Obama says that we need to “spread the wealth around.” But whose wealth, and to whom?
A cynic once observed that a politician is a man who boasts about taking money from the few to give to the many, while actually taking money from the many to give to a favored few. Obama’s proposals would do that, by enriching wealthy trial lawyers by promoting lawsuits than do more to enrich lawyers than their clients, and by radically increasing the size of government (government employees are…
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