1. ‘Obama’s Approach Is Not How to ‘Live Within Our Means’ – Jeffrey Anderson, The Weekly Standard

This piece is a friendly reminder that President Obama’s recent talk of cutting spending and decreasing our nation’s debt is large departure from his policies and very recent past priorities. President Obamas’s budget for 2011 (rejected in the Senate 97-0 and the last time he actually put his plan down on paper for judgement) showed his true colors; Ever increasing government spending and deficits that grow and grow:

But even if our levels of taxation had stayed at that postwar high of 20.6 percent, that wouldn’t have come anywhere near covering Obama’s unprecedented appetite for spending. Obama’s budget calls for spending an average of 24 percent of GDP across ten years. Pre-Obama, the last time the federal government spent 24 percent of GDP was during World War II (see table 1.3).

Obama disingenuously suggests that if he had been faced with a surplus in 2000, he would have used it to help pay off the debt. Yet three straight $1 trillion-plus deficits haven’t lessoned his appetite for “investments” (particularly in Obamacare, fast trains, and “green energy”), nor his desire to borrow another $2.4 trillion for the next year and a half.

In addition, Obama once again falsely implied that he somehow has a plan to reduce deficit spending by $4 trillion. That’s a phantom $4 trillion from a phantom plan. The only real plan Obama has put forward is his budget, and deficit spending under his budget would be $1 billion a day higher than under the Paul Ryan-authored House budget. In all, Obama’s 10-year budget calls for raising our national debt to a staggering $27.6 trillion — from $14.5 trillion today and $9.986 trillion shortly after he was elected.

2. ‘China’s Military Flexes Its Muscle‘ – Tom Vanden Brook and Calum MacLeod, USA Today

A medium-length article detailing some of the latest developments of the Chinese military and how the US military is reacting to them:

The United States has far more ships and warplanes worldwide, but in just two decades China has created the largest force of submarines and amphibious warfare ships in Asia. Its air force has added hundreds of fighter jets comparable to U.S. F-15s and F-16s. This year China’s military announced it had successfully tested a military fighter jet — the J-20 — that based on video appears to have radar-evading stealth characteristics.

China also announced it is about to launch its first aircraft carrier and is developing an anti-ship missile that can strike from 900 miles away, according to the Pentagon report.

3. ‘If a Law Doesn’t Work, Waive It Away?‘ – John E. Sununu, The Boston Globe

Former Senator John Sununu lucidly explains how the Obamacare waiver campaign showcases the Health Care Reform law’s haphazard and reckless nature. It may not seem like much to ask, but I would like our democratically elected leaders to know what is in a law before they pass it and force us citizens to live under its yoke:

HHS began shutting down the waiver program – an action it announced on a Friday afternoon, the customary way to bury bad news in Washington. Companies now face a September deadline to apply for protection. After that, they’re out of luck. According to the administration, without the special treatment, health care premiums for 3 million workers would have gone up by 10 percent or more. A note to social engineers of all parties: If you have to protect 3 million people from a brand-new law, it probably wasn’t very well written in the first place.

That this was an unintended consequence is clear from the fact that the law never contemplated a need for waivers in the first place. In a stroke of bureaucratic magic, HHS simply granted itself the power, and started dispensing the passes. Only when independent groups started pressing for transparency did things begin to shut down.

The broader lesson here is that the constant need for special waivers is symptomatic of poorly written public policy. It’s a signal that the cost of compliance is unreasonably high; the benefits are hard to measure; and either legislators or regulators have failed to do their homework.

4. ‘The Independent Payment Advisory Board Could Be Obama’s Achilles’ Heel‘ – Doug Scheon, Huffington Post

Speaking of Obamacare failures and unintended consequences, even the Huffington Post has come out against the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which empowers unelected bureaucrats to determine medicare coverage:

For conservatives, Independents and a growing number of Democrats, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) that was created with the passage of last year’s health care law represents the worst of health care reform. IPAB would allow an unelected board to singularly enact spending cuts in the Medicare program through binding recommendations to reduce Medicare spending.

Last weekend, Reps. Tim Bishop of New York and Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas were the latest Democrats to join the increasing bipartisan effort that opposes IPAB as they signed on as co-sponsors of Rep. Phil Roe’s bill to repeal it. Quite simply, IPAB has so many opponents because it embodies centralized planning from Washington, D.C., and enables unelected bureaucrats to make decisions about people’s health care. The contrast couldn’t be more clear: a new government body (IPAB) charged with taking resources away from the beloved Medicare program.

5. ‘Why Is the Left So Frustrated with Obama?‘ – Jay Cost, The Weekly Standard

For many conservatives, it is difficult to understand that many liberals are unhappy with President Obama. Leave it to the always enlightening Jay Cost to explain why many liberals have good reasons to be upset with the man they held such hope for:

Between 1968 and 2004 liberals did not win a single presidential election. Republicans won seven of the ten elections held during this period, and Southern, moderate Democrats won the other three. Worse for liberals, both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton regularly governed without much regard for the liberal flank of their own party – as can be seen in Carter’s opposition to a universal health care bill sponsored by Ted Kennedy, and Bill Clinton agreeing to NAFTA, a balanced budget, and welfare reform…

Then along comes Barack Obama, an extremely appealing candidate for liberals. For starters, his background as a state senator in Hyde Park indicated pretty clearly that he was on the left-hand side of his party. Yet at the same time Obama proved himself extremely adept at avoiding the kind of entanglements that undermined candidates like Dukakis and Kerry. There was no Willie Horton furlough flap. No Kerry moment – “I voted for it before I voted against it.”  And, unlike Al Gore, Obama could articulate traditional Democratic themes without sounding like an over-rehearsed imitation of William Jennings Bryan.

Thoughts? Questions? Recommendations?

The Washington Post chart above (H/T Cato) clearly lays out three key truths: 1. The United States government has a structural problem controlling it’s level of debt and spending 2. The growing size of the federal government and its debt has been a bipartisan affair 3. President Obama’s tenure has greatly exasperated America’s short and long term financial situation.

In 30 years the United States’ debt has increased from $1 trillion dollars to $14 trillion and if the chart continued into the projected future, well, you would have had to scroll even further down to read this. I may not be an economist or an expert on Congressional budgets, but I don’t have to be to know we are on the wrong track. The past few weeks we have constantly heard the President and numerous other political leaders strongly defend the status quo. Sure there is much talk about ‘cutting spending’, but where are the details?

We need much more than gimmicks and baseline budgeting tricks to solve our real problems. We need leaders to tackle the transparent challenge shown in the aforementioned chart and we just aren’t getting it from this White House and Senate. For gosh sakes, the US Senate has put a constitutionally mandated budget in over two years! Why haven’t they? It’s pretty simple: If you never take a stand, you never have to take responsibility. I’ll finish with the first and last entries on Congressman Paul Ryan’s (a man who put out a budget all by himself, are you listening US Senate?) timeline of the Obama administration’s financial stewardship:

January 20, 2009
President Obama sworn into office

• President tells the American people in his Inaugural Address: “Those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”
• Debt Held By Public = $6.31 trillion

……..

July 15, 2011
President Holds Press Conference: “We’re Running Out of Time” to Deal with Debt

• President Obama tells reporters: “I’ve got reams of paper and printouts and spreadsheets on my desk, and so we know how we can create a package that solves the deficits and debt for a significant period of time.  But in order to do that, we got to get started now.”
• The American people have still not seen any “paper” or “printouts” of what specific spending cuts the President supports.  The American people have still not seen any “spreadsheets” from the White House to corroborate their claims of having offered a deficit reduction plan.
• While it’s long past time for Washington “to get started now” on tackling our debt problems, President Obama has still not proposed a credible budget, and Senate Democrats have still not proposed any budget.
• Debt Held by Public = $9.75 trillion

Saturday’s lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal poignantly identifies the problem with the President and the liberal elite’s mindset in today’s politics: let’s focus on new programs and bury any discussion of how we’re going to pay for them or the current ones we already can’t afford. The WSJ says it best:

“Maybe the most unknowing moment from President Obama’s debt-limit press conference the other day was when he said that, ‘I’d rather be talking about stuff that everybody welcomes, like new programs.’ Define everybody—and, please, let us know when the new programs are going to stop.”

Yes, Mr. President, please tell us when we can finally start addressing the record debt and deficits. Or the impending bankruptcy of Medicare. Or the several trillion dollar shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund. Or the rising interest that we have to pay to service our massive debt to foreigners (41 cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed!). Or a handful of other disastrous budgetary issues we have ignored over the past several years (like pensions, for starters).

In light of this deep hole we are in as a country – and the very real display in Greece of what our future might look like if we stay on this current path – it is absolutely stunning to think we are still pondering new government programs. Just a cursory look at the several thousand federal programs and agencies that we have now should put to rest the thought that we need any more government or that the government we currently have is somehow cost-effective.

Yet this is the guiding light of modern day liberalism. As Thomas Sowell recently put it when discussing President Obama’s advocacy for a new high-speed rail program, “One of the most successful political ploys is to promise people things without having the money to pay for them. Then, when others want to cut back on the things that have been promised, blame them for lacking the compassion of those who wrote the checks without enough money in the bank to cover them.”

Nevertheless, with an ever increasing percent of the American population paying no federal income taxes, receiving government-run health care and cashing in on welfare programs (e.g., unemployment benefits, food stamps), the argument for a fiscally sane federal government is becoming a more difficult sell.

Sadly, it might take a default on the national debt before Americans realize we are on an unsustainable path. In the meantime, it appears the conductor (President Obama) will be sitting in the caboose figuring out how to add more cars to the train.

Senator Barack Obama, March, 2006:

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” he said. “It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”

Senator Obama was right. Too bad, he’s now the President and appears to have not meant a word of that statement above. Too bad for all of us. President Obama has tried to portray himself as the adult in this debt ceiling debate, but when it comes to taking care of our nation’s fiscal well being his administration has made a drunk teenager in love look responsible and mature. Just months ago he released a budget so unserious that his own party and the entire Senate disowned it 97-0. He came into office to lead a country facing massive debt and managed to make the situation even worse as our debt has sky rocketed in the past 3 years. He not only has failed to do anything to rectify our coming entitlement crisis, he has actually made them even worse by passing a new health care entitlement and vilifying anyone who is willing to address Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, all of which are facing major funding shortages.  Barack Obama is many things, a good leader, he is not.

The United States has suffered through unserious leadership for years now. Besides a flawed, but well-intentioned effort to reform our faltering social security entitlement system, President George W. Bush did little to curb the relentless government spending that is putting our remarkable country in peril. In his three years so far in office, President Barack Obama has not only done absolutely nothing to contain our out of control deficits and spending, but actually put them on an even more unsustainable path.

The numbers don’t lie; the American financial system and economy is in deep trouble:

Obama’s ten year budget projections, which include optimistic GDP growth estimates, contain over a trillion dollars in debt annually. Our dire situation is not just for policy wonks or Chicken Littles. One only has to look to what is happening in Greece this very day to remind us how bad things can become. How did we get here?

Walter Russell Mead attempts to answer that question in a piece called ‘When Government Jumps the Shark‘. He brings his readers along the progressive path to a growing government with more and more responsibilities. The first few stages usually have gone well with small government programs providing services that the American people want and can use, but then comes trouble….

The fourth stage of life comes when the Great White Elephant morphs into a Great White Shark: a man-eating terror of the deep that ruthlessly attacks anyone who gets in its way.  At this stage the government program has moved beyond being wasteful and has become unsustainable.  Fannie Mae goes from providing mortgages to creditworthy households to providing vast numbers of mortgages to uncreditworthy households, poisoning the financial system with bad loans.  Medicare is unsustainable in the medium term and hugely expensive day to day — even as the procedures and regulations of Medicare warp investment decisions across the entire health care system.

But even as these programs become unsustainable, they have become so powerful — there are so many interests and industries that grow rich on these programs, and so many families for whom these programs have become the cornerstone of what little financial security they have — that they cannot be touched.  One way to tell when an elephant has morphed into a shark: when pundits and politicians start describing a government program as a ‘third rail’: you touch it, you die.

The Great White Shark is a menace that cannot be controlled.  The program has gone rogue: the Army Corps of Engineers isn’t just building pointless dams.  It is building bad dams.  The agricultural subsidies aren’t just encouraging farmers to plant wasteful crops; by subsidizing corn ethanol they are contributing to food price inflation that threatens political stability in countries like Egypt.  But just as the programs are most in need of reform, reform becomes impossible.  If you try to stop Fannie Mae from tempting poor urbanites into ruinous mortgages..

The problem today is that we are looking not just at one or two government programs that have succumbed to elephantiasis or turned into sharks; the progressive complex of social and economic policy as a whole has reached this point.  Today many of our New Deal and Great Society programs are either elephants or sharks.  They either lead us to misallocate scarce resources in ineffective ways or they threaten us with ruin by becoming politically untouchable budget busters.

Progressivism itself, and not simply the individual government programs it spawns, is moving through the same cycle of life.  The most urgent social problems that progressivism set out to solve have been dealt with.  Child labor and lynch mobs are no longer common in the United States.  The greatest natural and scenic treasures of the country are protected by the National Park system.  Food is much less dangerous, buildings are better built, cars are safer, the air and water is in better shape and the charismatic megafauna (big interesting animals) have been saved from extinction.  Many more people have much more access to education today than was true 100 years ago; ditto for lifesaving medical treatment.

The progressive vision morphed from Great White Hope and Great White Father into Great White Elephant over the years.  Early progressives picked the low-hanging fruit; they addressed the most important problems that were most susceptible to progressive interventions.  Increasingly they are left with more expensive, less effective approaches to big problems (like Obamacare) or the agenda moves from issues of great moral and political significance like equal rights for African-Americans to less consequential issues like wider social acceptance of the transgendered.  To raise the percentage of young Americans attending college from 2 percent to 20 percent is a significant achievement; to extend it from 40 percent to 60 percent will likely cost much more and accomplish much less in terms of raising social productivity.

We now see the progressive agenda dealing with issues like high speed rail, where the gains are so small and the rationale are so weak from the beginning that the program is a white elephant before it is fully set up.

If you aren’t already shaken, beware, as there’s one final stage and it isn’t pretty. Think Greece, but on a massive scale. Instead of jumping the shark we might be eaten by a whale.

(Chart: Courtesy of Keith Hennessey)

1. ‘Democrats join Republicans in questioning Obama’s policy on Israel‘, Peter Wallsten, Washington Post

Who said President Obama was a divider? His position on the Israel-Palestine conflict seems to be uniting Democrats and Republicans in opposition. This was visibly seen during Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on  Tuesday:

2. ‘A World of Our Making‘ – G. John Ikenberry, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas

Esteemed International Relations scholar G. John Ikenberry provides an in depth look at the changing global order, warning that though its current liberal make up will remain intact, changes are a coming:

This American-led liberal hegemonic order is now in crisis. The underlying foundations that support this order have shifted. Pressures for change—and for the reorganization of order—are growing. But amidst this great transformation, it is important to untangle what pre-cisely is in crisis and what is not. My claim is that it is a crisis of author-ity—a struggle over how liberal order should be governed. But it is not a crisis over the underlying principles of liberal international order, defined as an open and loosely rule-based system. That is, what is in dispute is how aspects of liberal order—sovereignty, institutions, participation, roles, and responsibilities—are to be allocated, but all within the order rather than in its wake.

If the old postwar hegemonic order were a business enterprise, it would have been called America Inc. It was an order that, in important respects, was owned and operated by the United States. The crisis today is really over ownership of that company.

3. ‘A Formidable Republican Field‘ - Jay Cost, The Weekly Standard

Cost makes a compelling case that the current GOP presidential leaders, Pawlenty, Romney, and Huntsman, are a more formidable challenge to President Obama than many in the media would have you believe. Cost also reminds us that contrary to what many Obama supporters hope, a Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich candidacy, the Republican Party has for the past 40 years chosen a mainstream candidate:

With Mitch Daniels having taken himself out of the GOP nomination battle, the field has come into sharp focus, and the view is not good for President Obama and the Democrats.

If one were only to read commentary and analysis from the mainstream media, this would surely come as quite a shock, as the GOP field is usually portrayed as uninspiring and lackluster. But then again the MSM is often behind the curve when it comes to the Republican party, seeing as how most journalists and pundits do not identify with it or the modern conservative movement that animates it. Most are politically aligned with Obama, and so unsurprisingly they think his would-be Republican challengers are second-raters.

My position over the last three months has been that Republicans need to evaluate each contender along three key metrics: general election competitiveness, legislative skill, and party stewardship. I think conservatives have legitimate concerns about the field, although it’s also worth waiting to see whether the main contenders can address this issue to the right’s satisfaction.

Today, I want to look at things strictly from the competitiveness metric, and here I think the main contenders — Jon Huntsman, Tim Pawlenty, and Mitt Romney — all score very, very well. I see four reasons for drawing this conclusion…

4. ‘Chomsky’s Follies‘ – Christopher Hitchens, Slate

Chomsky, who Hitchens (And Paul Berman) correctly note, still enjoys some reputation both as a scholar and a public intellectual, had some remarkably delusional things to say regarding the American killing of Osama Bin Laden. Hitchens takes the creepy, radical leftist to task:

It’s no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn’t trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of “naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes ‘Jew’ and ‘Gypsy.’ ”

In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn’t even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.

5. ‘Word of the Decade: ‘Unsustainable”, Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal

Peggy Noonan lucidly describes how Americans are coming to terms with our unsustainable fiscal situation:

We’re at a funny place. The American establishment has finally come around, in unison, to admitting that America is in crisis, that our debt actually threatens our ability to endure, that if we don’t make progress on this, we are going to near our endpoint as a nation. I am struck very recently by the number of leaders in American business, politics and journalism who now get a certain faraway look at the end of an evening or a meal and say, “It’s worse than people think, you know.”

Here are this week’s top articles that GPP recommends highly.

1. Falling Between Two Stools – Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest

Mead argues that the Obama team needs to get itself together and soon or it faces a failed presidency and a diminished United States:

Finally, there is a kind of temperamental caution that has not, so far, served this President well.  Unlike George W. Bush, who liked to place large and even reckless bets, President Obama likes to hedge.  If he puts four chips on black, he almost immediately wants to put three chips on red.  He surges in Afghanistan, but time limits the surge.  He bombs Libya, but vows to keep the boots offshore.  This can look like a prudent step to limit losses; in some cases it may make bigger losses inevitable.

2. Fleecing the Facebook Generation – Bill Frezza, Forbes

A brilliantly snarky take on the young adults of America’s stubborn support for the current entitlement system:

Let me get this straight. You kids from Generation Twit, or whatever they call 20-somethings these days, are rallying to keep Washington’s Ponzi-as-you-go entitlement systems alive despite the fact that you will never see a dime for yourselves. And, stupid me, I’m wasting my breath trying to talk sense into you.

Sitting here a mere eight years from sticking my snout into the public trough, maybe I need to rethink this. Perhaps I should back off criticizing all those liberal college professors who charged your parents $50,000 a year to fill your heads with mush. Maybe they did me a favor. You graduated so brimming with altruism that you’re willing to sacrifice your own economic well-being so my college buddies and I can keep ourselves in expensive wines and fine single malts until we’re sucking them down through feeding tubes.

3. US Must Stop Libya From Becoming a Farce – Anthony Cordesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Cordesman, one of America’s most sober and sharp foreign policy analysts, finds much to worry about in the current US-France-UK led approach in Libya:

What is already certain is that the end result was a set of decisions that focused on short term considerations and bet on the come. French, British, and US leaders do not seem to have fully coordinated, but it is clear that they sought and got international cover from the UN by claiming a no fly zone could protect civilians when their real objective was to use force as a catalyst to drive Qaddafi out of power. They seem to have assumed that a largely unknown, divided, and fractured group of rebels could win through sheer political momentum and could then be turned into a successful government. They clearly planned a limited air campaign that called for a politically safe set of strikes again against Qaddafi’s air defense and air force, and only limited follow-up in terms of ground strikes against his forces. And then, they waited for success…

4. Obama’s Sophistry on the Budget Deficit – Jay Cost, Weekly Standard

When it comes to dissecting modern politics and politicians, no one is better than Mr. Jay Cost:

Obama regularly praises some value that is expounded mostly by conservatives, then turns around to qualify or balance it with a point made by the left. This is designed to create the impression that he is in the political center, or better yet at the final stage of a dialectical process: conservatism the thesis, liberalism the antithesis, Obama the synthesis.

However, this rhetorical move is inevitably a non sequitur, and always promulgated for the same, political purpose. In the case of the deficit, and what to do about it, the president’s “faith” in the free market is completely abstract and is unrelated to the real world of political debate. Sure, he’s pro-free market in the sense that he prefers it to socialism or communism, but that has nothing to do with the contemporary political divide. Most everybody in the mainstream political discourse agrees that free markets – of some sort – are good. The country is not debating whether to become a communist country. Instead, it is debating how much the government should involve itself in the free market.

Obama knows this, of course, and his speech is intended to confuse the issue, to make it seem like his policy proposals are not as liberal as they actually are. He starts out at 30,000 feet, above the political fray, to explain and praise our shared American values, some emphasized by conservatives and others by liberals, then he quietly zooms down to the ground level to stake out a position on the left hand side of the divide, arguing speciously that this final spot is consistent with where he started out. His hope is that you will not notice the transition, and thus assume that his decidedly left wing position is in fact the one that synthesizes liberalism and conservatism.

5. Union Busting, Massachusetts Style – Kimberley Strassel, Wall Street Journal

It appears that Wisconsin’s efforts to curb public union power is becoming more the norm, rather than the exception:

Pop quiz: What political party, in what state, this week passed a bill in the dead of night stripping public-sector unions of their collective- bargaining powers? Republicans in Wisconsin? The GOP in Ohio or Indiana?

Try Democrats in Massachusetts. Maybe the debate over public-sector benefits isn’t all that ideological after all.

What did you like? Hate? Feel free to offer your own recommendations in the comments.

Today we need a leader, not a politican or celebrity.

Senator Barack Obama in 2006 in reference to his ‘No’ vote on raising the debt limit:

The fact that we’re here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign — is a sign of leadership failure. Leadership means the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.

Senator Obama was right. Today, President Obama is set to make a speech outlining how he would lead the country through our mounting fiscal crisis. I have the word ‘lead’ italicized because so far as President, Barack Obama, has done everything but lead on this issue. Just a few months ago he put out a budget for the next ten years that featured more than a $1 trillion dollars of debt annually. He used the fiscal crisis to pass another unfunded and uncontrollable entitlement program at a time when our current ones were becoming untenable. This is a time for leadership and so far President Barack Obama has refused to lead. Let’s hope today that changes.

I would like to thank David Harsanyi of the Denver Post and The Detroit News for helping me compile this small list featuring just some of the bureaucratic web that is our federal government:

• 56 separate programs to help people better understand their finances
• 18 federal food and nutrition assistance programs, costing taxpayers $62.5 billion in 2008
• 10 agencies or departments administering 82 programs dealing with teacher quality
• 80 different economic development programs
• 15 different agencies overseeing food safety
• 18 programs responsible for delivering food assistance to the poor
• 24 federal agencies operating data centers
• 20 programs dealing with homelessness
• 44 programs among Education, Labor and Health and Human Services Departments delivering employment and job training programs
• 5 agencies within the Transportation Department administering more than 100 involved in surface transportation, highway, traffic safety, and railroads

I’m sure many of these programs serve a valuable purpose, but the redundancy of similar programs showcases a federal government that has grown to such a size that it is just feeding off it self. Bureaucracies by their nature grow they don’t wither and the plethora of these programs and departments listed above is proof. Eighty-two programs for promoting teacher quality! We are just talking federal level here, folks. Under President Obama, the budget of the Department of Education has more than doubled, with even this year, where ‘austerity’ is in vogue, seeing it grow another 4.2%. This is not money for books or better teachers, this is a raise for the bureaucracy known as the Department of Education.

In this chart below made by the Cato Institute, one can easily see the growth of all aspects of government from 2007-2012:

I would like to highlight the tremendous growth of ‘Other Mandatory’, which according to CATO features federal employee benefits, food stamps, etc and ‘Domestic Discretionary’, which of course features funding for bureaucracies like the Department of Education, Transportation, etc. President Obama has said that he wants to freeze spending on these sectors. Well, that’s nice, but how about we bring them back down to a level pre-Stimulus spending binge instead. It’s like our government has had 10 shots of patron and said ‘that’s enough, I’m done’. Unfortunately, that leaves us all in a sick and woozy position.