At an East Room event on Tuesday, President Obama will be admitting to the American people that the time has come to start showing some fiscal discipline in Congress. He’s decided it’s time to get serious, roll up his sleeves and get down to the hard work of reigning in our out of control spending and staggering budget deficit.
His answer is a new Pay-as-you-Go system backed up by the force of law. It’s intent is to require Congress to pay for any new spending or tax cuts by making cuts in other areas of the budget.
Just how stupid does Obama think we really are? PayGo rules are already in place in both the House and Senate, where they are waived continuously. So we’ll back these rules with the “force of law” and make congress comply with them!
We had a PayGo statute in place from 1991 until 2002 and guess what happened? Congress never enforced the statute and proceeded to add more than $700 billion to the budget deficit! As a matter of fact, Congress waived it’s own PayGo rules to pass the recent $1.1 trillion stimulus bill.
The truth of the matter is Paygo will not reduce the rate of federal spending or it’s growth nor is it designed to. It exempts current spending programs and their growth but treats current tax cuts as new programs requireing cuts in other areas each year to continue.
But don’t think this legislation is just a diversion by Obama to make the public think he is planning to become a fiscal conservative. This plan does accomplish one very important goal of his. It establishes a legislative bias in favor of higher taxes. With all the discussion of health care reform, Cap and Trade and a new national consumption tax you can believe this is being proposed now for a reason and will fit into Obama’s overall strategy for seizing more of our income.
I expect the national Propaganda networks to be praising this new policy all day. What a joke.
