Obama's cognitive dissonance

President Obama held a townhall yesterday and told us something that I wasn't quite sure he had realized.

President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending “unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.

“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

Holders of U.S. debt will eventually “get tired” of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. “It will have a dampening effect on our economy.”

Well, that's all well and good to acknowledge. But what evidence do we have that the Obama administration is doing anything to ward off this situation. He might think that we would believe he is just taking temporary actions in the face of this economic crisis and we'll scale back as soon as the economy recovers. But remember that much of that stimulus is for elements like support for education that it is hard to believe our Congress would ever want to cut. And also remember that we haven't even started on the big goals for the Obama administration- cap and trade plus health care insurance guaranteed for everyone. Does anyone find that those will be cost-free for either our economy or for government spending?

Either President Obama is suffering severe cognitive dissonance or he's just mouthing what sounds good when he warns of deficit spending but actually is determined to keep it up as long as he can accomplish his goals of having the federal government address education, the environment, and health care.

I vote for the hypocrisy explanation. We've been told over and over how smart Barack Obama is. He knows he's expanding the federal government as fast as possible so he will have a hard time explaining how this is somehow going to shrink the deficit. Remember that this is an administration that will do anything possible to help their union supporters. Read George Will's column from yesterday about how the administration's behavior in forbidding California to make cuts in wages for state employees despite having contracts that allow it to do so and their ignoring contracts when dealing with Chrylser's creditors who should have been ahead of the unions. His conclusion is harsh, but true.

The Obama administration's agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of "economic planning" and "social justice" that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration's central activity -- the political allocation of wealth and opportunity -- is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.