A Brief History…

UPDATE: The Senate blocked the Omnibus spending bill last night with two Democrats decining support. This may be a sign of more disillusionment.

There are the first small tremors of buyers remorse showing up. Even Chris Matthews is sounding disillusioned. Even David Brooks has made a small quibble.

But the Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once.

So programs are piled on top of each other and we wind up with a gargantuan $3.6 trillion budget. We end up with deficits that, when considered realistically, are $1 trillion a year and stretch as far as the eye can see. We end up with an agenda that is unexceptional in its parts but that, when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new.

I’m sure that Obama is trembling in his shoes at this moderate assault.

Christopher Buckley is waving a pinky goodbye to his love affair with Obama.

Hold on—there’s a typo in that paragraph. “$3.6 trillion budget” can’t be right.The entire national debt is—what—about $11 trillion? He can’t actually be proposing to spend nearly one-third of that in one year, surely. Let me check. Hmm. He did. The Wall Street Journal notes that federal outlays in fiscal 2009 will rise to almost 30 percent of the gross national product. In language that even an innumerate English major such as myself can understand: The US government is now spending annually about one-third of what the entire US economy produces. As George Will would say, “Well.”
Now let me say: Unlike Rush Limbaugh, I want President Obama to succeed. I honestly do. We are all in this leaky boat together—did I say “leaky”? I meant “sieve-like”—and it would be counterproductive, if not downright suicidal, to want it to go down just to prove a conservative critique of Keynesian economics.
But let’s all be honest about this: No one knows how all this is going to turn out in the end. Do you, really? If we learned one thing during the runup to this rancid enchilada, it is that most of the smartest people in the room were wrong, and the other ones were crooked.

Oh well, Buckley has had his moment of fame and I’m sure his trust fund is safely invested in the Cayman Islands, like Teresa Heinz Kerry and the Kennedy family. Still, even David Gergen is muttering a bit. Well, a little bit.

It isn’t popular to say right now but there is growing reason to question whether this is the wisest course in terms of our most urgent and pressing challenge: a collapsing world economy. News on the economic front has to be sobering to even the most optimistic among us. Last Friday, we learned that the economy contracted in the 4th quarter by over 6 percent. Over the weekend, Warren Buffett warned that the economy would be in a “shambles” through 2009 and possibly beyond. On Monday, the government issued its fourth bailout for AIG, European ministers rejected a general bailout for Eastern Europe, and the Dow sank below 7,000 – down some 25% since its run-up in January. This Friday economists expect the latest U.S. unemployment numbers to be dismal. Already, the administration’s optimistic economic forecasts for next year look way too rosy.

Well, Obama is not listening to these people. Does he listen to anyone ? Michelle, maybe ?

Even Stuart Taylor is speaking out. Where were these guys last fall ? Buying a pig in a poke, that’s where.

Hang on ! This will be rough. If any of my children who voted for Obama read this, you know who will pay. Even if you don’t want to know, you know. I won’t be there to pay for you.