Obama's gimmicky promise to end gimmicks

Like the overweight guy who promises to start dieting -- later, President Obama is promising us the end of irresponsible budgets.

President Barack Obama vowed Saturday that irresponsible budgets were a thing of the past as he promised bold action to help the United States emerge from the current economic crisis stronger than before.

In his weekly radio address, Obama said his administration had inherited a 1.3-trillion-dollar budget deficit -- and a budgeting process that he called "irresponsible as it is unsustainable."

He argued that for years Washington as well as Wall Street had used accounting tricks to conceal real costs of programs.

"These kinds of irresponsible budgets -- and inexcusable practices -- are now in the past," the president said. "For the first time in many years, my administration has produced a budget that represents an honest reckoning of where we are and where we need to go."

This after he pushed for and signed close to $800 billion in supposed stimulus spending which was really a compendium of old liberal wishlists that had been lying around for a while. This after he is pushing for and promising to sign the omnibus spending package left over from last year's Congress because the Democrats wanted to pass a higher spending package than they thought they could get past President Bush. Now he wants to start acting responsible.

But he's still relying on gimmicks. He's promising us $2 trillion in deficit reduction when his budget director had to admit under devastating questioning by Representative Paul Ryan that they're coming up with that number simply by imagining what they would have spent if the surge had been in force for 10 years and then magically finding savings by not spending that money on the surge and presto! they've saved $1.6 billion.

It's fuzzy math, but in the same speech where Obama is promising to get rid of budget gimmickry, he uses those same tired gimmicks.

I guess he'll stop using those gimmicks - later. But the rhetoric - he'll use that now.

How much blame can President Obama take for the stock slide?

It's always hard to tease out all the reasons for the stock market going down. But Business Week asks the question of how much blame the Obama administration deserves for the slide that has been going on since he took office. Clearly, the market was heading south since before the election for reasons that have nothing to do with Barack Obama. But the president in office, however much he may or may not deserve it, always gets the credit or blame for how the economy does while he is in office. But has the Obama administration done anything to ameliorate the slide or has his performance exacerbated the fallout on Wall Street? And Business Week clearly comes to the latter conclusion. They identify several elements to the slide. First there were unreasonable expectations that no political messiah, no matter how gifted, could have lived up to. But they have just bungled any approach to easing the financial crisis. President Obama promised us that Secretary Geithner would present a detailed plan on February 10, but then Geithner gave a poor presentation of an unsubstantial program and people lost confidence that there was any coherent strategy coming from this administration on how to deal with the credit crunch. And that created great uncertainty about what the government was planning.

A lack of details from Geithner disturbed investors, says Quincy Krosby, chief investment strategist at the Hartford (HIG). "Markets need certainty," she says. "The market has been sitting here waiting, waiting, waiting. That allows rumors and conspiracy theories to dominate."

Jerry Webman, chief economist at OppenheimerFunds (OPY), defends the Administration. "I would like to see Administration people more visible" on the issue, he says. But, "the problem is: What do we expect them to say? 'This is a big complicated problem and we don't know where we're going to get the money to solve it'? That would be the truth," Webman says, but it wouldn't make market participants very happy.

We might be uncertain as to what they're going to do for the financial crisis, but they've been very frank about all their plans for rebuilding the economy in other areas. And the market has responded to some of those plans.

The impact of Obama's proposals are easy to see in particular segments of the market. In a speech to Congress on Feb. 24, Obama pledged a "substantial down payment" on health-care reform. David Chalupnick, head of equities at First American Funds, points out that, since then, stocks in the Dow Jones U.S. Health Care Providers Index (IHF) are down 16%. Health-care stocks had been a relative safe haven in the market, because medical spending tends to hold up even in recessions.

Investors aren't just expressing their political beliefs that taxes and regulations are bad for the economy. They're also making a practical calculation that they will hurt corporate bottom lines in the future. "What you're doing is lowering the profitability of these firms," says Bill Larkin of Cabot Money Management.

I think the uncertainty is one of the deepest problems. If you have a business and you're thinking of expanding, how can you base decisions projecting energy costs, government regulations, health care for your employees, tax rates, etc.?

That's why a Democrat who supported Obama like Jim Cramer has now earned a place on the Obama enemies list by ranting about how the Obama administration is harming our economy.

But Obama has undeniably made things worse by creating an atmosphere of fear and panic rather than an atmosphere of calm and hope. He's done it by pushing a huge amount of change at a very perilous moment, by seeking to demonize the entire banking system and by raising taxes for those making more than $250,000 at the exact time when we need them to spend and build new businesses, and by revoking deductions for funds to charity that help eliminate the excess supply of homes.

We had a banking crisis coming into this regime, but now every area is in crisis. Each day is worse than the previous one for this miserable economy and while Obama's champions cite the stimulus plan, it's really just a hodgepodge of old Democratic pork and will not create nearly as many manufacturing or service jobs as we hoped. China's stimulus plan is the model; ours is the parody.

President Obama might pooh pooh the importance of the steady drop of the stock market when he said,

"You know, the stock market is sort of like a tracking poll in politics. It bobs up and down day to day, and if you spend all your time worrying about that, then you're probably going to get the long-term strategy wrong."

But he can't ignore the causes of that free fall or the effect that that has. This isn't like 1929 when only a small percentage of the public was invested in the stock market. Now the great majority of Americans are part of the investor class. And they're seeing their savings for retirement fade away as well as perhaps the money that they'd invested to save for their kids' college or that new house. Peter Wehner puts it well,

The market is plunging, not gyrating. And to compare it to a tracking poll in politics is foolish and somewhat callous. What we are witnessing are trillions of dollars of people’s savings evaporating. It is causing enormous fear in a lot of people, especially those nearing or in retirement, who are watching their life savings disappear. To cavalierly dismiss this concern, as Obama does, is a sign that he is already at the point of employing unserious arguments to explain a crisis he has, so far, not only been unable to reverse, but has made worse.

It’s amazing how quickly a formidable political figure, in the midst of a crisis he (so far) seems unable to confront, can go tone deaf. And, of course, the next step when you’re at sea is to attack Rush Limbaugh. Gosh, and to think we were told that we were through with petty politics and childish ways.

And while this uncertainty continues, as Gerald Seib points out, consumer confidence will keep falling and the economy will continue to falter.

Indeed, Mr. McInturff notes that in a January Journal/NBC poll, equal percentages of Americans cited the decline in the stock market and the broader slowdown in the economy as a factor having "a great deal" of impact on them. In other words, people were as likely to feel hurt by the stock market's decline as by the overall economic decline.

There's an explanation for that finding, of course, which is that stocks have become steadily more important in the real economic condition of average Americans. The spread of 401(k)s and individual retirement accounts means market conditions penetrate tens of millions more homes now, which is one of the most significant changes in the structure of the economy in the past generation.

Figures compiled by the Investment Company Institute, the national association of investment firms, tell the tale. The institute conducts an annual survey of American households to gauge stock ownership. It found that the number of American households owning mutual funds -- the most common vehicle for holding stocks -- more than doubled between 1987 and 2007, to 55.3 million households from 22.5 million. The percentage of households owning mutual funds during that period rose to 47.7% from 25.1%.

Put another way, a drop in the stock market now has a real -- not just a psychological -- impact on the well-being of half of America's households.

The effects are demonstrable. A new Journal/NBC poll, released this week, found that the Americans most likely to have stock investments -- those with family incomes above $50,000 -- also are markedly more likely to say they are very dissatisfied with the economy. In other times, that distinction might have gone to those on the lowest income rungs.

Obama has been losing the right of center analysts like David Brooks and Christopher Buckley who supported him over McCain and Palin. Now he's losing left of center supporters like Jim Cramer and Stuart Taylor. Taylor is particularly devastating in his column about Obama's contributions to our economic decline and the fuzzy numbers he's been using to try to pretend that his budget plan actually saves money.

As for the budget's $2 trillion in projected net "savings," Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag, admitted in testimony on Tuesday under questioning by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that $1.6 trillion comes from phantom cuts of the money that would be needed to sustain the troop surge in Iraq for another decade -- money that nobody ever intended to spend.

Other supposed savings -- especially from Medicare -- seem unlikely to materialize absent benefit cuts, which Obama has not proposed. And the cost of any health care legislation -- to be drafted largely by a Congress that is allergic to the kind of cost-cutting necessary to make universal care sustainable -- is likely to be two or three times the $634 billion over 10 years that Obama has budgeted.

Meanwhile, "politics trumps economics" in Obama's housing program, says Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson. It targets tax credits narrowly on first-time homebuyers with weak credit ratings while creating few incentives for the more affluent and credit-worthy people who have the collective buying power to revive the housing market. Obama also supports a "cram-down" proposal -- authorizing bankruptcy judges to unilaterally cut distressed homeowners' payments -- that would be hopelessly unadministrable at best and might drive up mortgage rates.

Taylor issues a final plea that many of us would endorse - that Obama would ponder these wise words from Margaret Thatcher.

And I hope that the president ponders well Margaret Thatcher's wise warning against some collectivist conceits, in a 1980 speech quoted by Wehner: "The illusion that government can be a universal provider, and yet society still stay free and prosperous.... The illusion that every loss can be covered by a subsidy. The illusion that we can break the link between reward and effort, and still get the reward."

Not wasting a crisis

Charles Krauthammer is particularly good today on analyzing the intellectual dishonesty of Obama's supposed program of taking us out of our financial crisis. The most important element is to misidentify the causes of the crisis. Obama's administration seems to have lost focus on the credit crisis. Then Obama has to redefine the crisis so as to push for funding for all the programs he wanted to do anyway.

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The "day of reckoning" has arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the banking industry. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful home buyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing-in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Ask yourself, would Obama have been pushing for all those program if there hadn't been any credit crisis sinking our economy? Of course he would. It's as if all the crisis has done is provided him with the spin to try to sell his policy objectives.

Unfortunately, for all our 401k's, the markets aren't fooled by this dishonest presentation of the reasons for our economic downturn.

Enjoying captivity so much

Here's a funny twist - some of those detainees we've been keeping in Iraq don't want to leave. They want to stay and complete the education they've begun while in detention.

An increasing number of Iraqi detainees are refusing to leave detention centres despite being eligible for release because they want to complete studies begun behind bars, a US general said on Sunday.

"In the last three or four months we have begun seeing detainees asking to stay in detention, usually to complete their studies," Major General Douglas Stone told a news conference in Baghdad.

The US military offers a wide range of educational programmes to the 23,000 or so detainees -- adults and juveniles -- being held at its two detention facilities, Camp Cropper near Baghdad's international airport and Camp Bucca near the southern port city of Basra.

Some parents of juvenile detainees, too, have asked that their children remain behind bars so they can continue their schooling, said Stone, the commanding general for US detainee operations in Iraq.

Not quite the gulag that America's enemies have been depicting, is it?

The right to bear nunchucks

Now this would make an interesting Supreme Court case. The prestigious law firm of Kirkland and Ellis has appealed to the Supreme Court a case to incorporate the Second Amendment to the states in a case concerning the right of a citizen to possess the weapon of choice for ninjas, nunchucks.

Here is the homepage of the man bringing the lawsuit against a conviction he received for possessing a nunchaku.

Welcome to the new1 homepage for Maloney v. Cuomo, the ongoing federal constitutional case that challenges New York's 34-year-old complete ban2 on any possession of the martial-arts weapon known as the nunchaku (pictured above and below). The mere possession of a nunchaku within one's own home for peaceful use in martial-arts practice by a person with no criminal record is classified as a misdemeanor that may carry up to a one-year prison sentence. Possession by a person with a criminal record is defined as a felony. Based upon research that I have conducted, it appears that New York and California are the only states in the United States that have ever defined and prosecuted as a crime the simple possession of nunchaku within one's own home. (Ironically, the nunchaku, which was originally a farm implement, was adapted for use as a weapon by the People of Okinawa after invading oppressive governments disarmed them, making it illegal to possess a sword or spear.)

Who knows if the Court will grant cert here. There are certainly other cases wending their way through the courts challenging whether the Second Amendment should apply to the states that the NRA has brought in Illinois and California. But maybe they can add in the nunchucks case on top of the NRA suits. Of course, there is a serious issue here, but can't you just imagine the comedic possibilities? As one commenter on Eugene Volokh's post writes,

As an originalist, I must conclude that nunchakus qualify as "arms" for Second Amendment purposes. After all, in 1789, the America still had a substantial pirate problem, and what better way to defeat pirates than with ninjas? The ninjas would have needed their nunchukus to defeat said pirates, so obviously nunchukus must have been in any well-stocked arsenal of the day.

Link via Eugene Volokh.

Never mind about those tax increases

Obama officials are already backtracking on some of their tax proposals that have riled even Congressional Democrats.

President Barack Obama is meeting strong Democratic Party resistance to his proposal to reduce tax deductions enjoyed by upper-income Americans and could be forced to drop or modify the idea.

Mr. Obama in his budget blueprint last week proposed a cap on itemized deductions for mortgage interest and charitable donations to help pay for his health-care overhaul. The plan would cost wealthier taxpayers about $318 billion in new taxes over 10 years, according to government estimates.

But after objections from Democratic lawmakers, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner appeared to suggest at one point Wednesday that the administration was willing to consider dropping or modifying the proposal.

The resistance from Mr. Obama's own party -- focusing on a single element of the president's tax plans -- could foreshadow broader troubles for the rest of his proposed tax increases.

Republicans have already taken aim at rate increases planned for higher-income earners, as well as the administration's plans to raise hundreds of billions of dollars through climate-change legislation.

Geitner sounds ready to drop the idea.

"We recognize there are other ways to do this," Mr. Geithner responded during a hearing Wednesday. "We are willing to listen to all ideas that meet these broad principles."

Why they thought that Congress would go along with raising the deductions on such sacred cows as charitable and mortgage deductions is mystifying. Doesn't anyone down there know about politics on Capitol Hill?

So, once they get rid of these ideas that they were predicting would raise over $300 billion over the next ten years, they'll have to come up with some new ideas. Perhaps, they would prefer to outsource that planning to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as they did on the stimulus bills, the omnibus budget and are planning to do on health care reform.

Releasing murderers in Britain

A growing scandal in Britain is what has happened since Justice officials have started releasing criminals from prison due to overcrowding. They haven't built enough prison space (sounds like a project for a stimulus package, doesn't it?) and so have released convicted murderers.

Murderers freed from life sentences under Labour have committed a string of rapes and killings.

Ministers last night admitted the full scale of reoffending by so-called lifers. After their release, the 65 killers committed at least three further murders, one attempted murder and three rapes.

They were also responsible for crimes such as a paedophile attack, two woundings causing grievous bodily harm and three offences of kidnapping, false imprisonment or abduction.

Reoffending: Convicted criminals released early from life sentences are responsible for a string of murders and rapes

Other crimes included burglary, robbery, drugs and firearms offences, threats to kill, indecent assault and violence.

The catalogue of offences raises questions over whether it can ever be considered 'safe' to release a convicted murderer.

Experts blamed prison overcrowding for increasing the pressure on the Parole Board to set the killers free.

Ministers have failed to build enough jail spaces to meet demand, and have had to implement a series of panic measures such as early release.

If a government can't keep people safe from murderers who have already been convicted, what can they do?

Don't expect to be energy independent any time soon

Robert Bryce has a bracing column today to clear up the illusion that we will get energy independent of fossil fuels any time in the forseeable future. The numbers just aren't there no matter how much effort we put into developing alternative sources of energy now.

During his address to Congress last week, President Barack Obama declared, "We will double this nation's supply of renewable energy in the next three years."

While that statement -- along with his pledge to impose a "cap on carbon pollution" -- drew applause, let's slow down for a moment and get realistic about this country's energy future. Consider two factors that are too-often overlooked: George W. Bush's record on renewables, and the problem of scale.

By promising to double our supply of renewables, Mr. Obama is only trying to keep pace with his predecessor. Yes, that's right: From 2005 to 2007, the former Texas oil man oversaw a near-doubling of the electrical output from solar and wind power. And between 2007 and 2008, output from those sources grew by another 30%.

Mr. Bush's record aside, the key problem facing Mr. Obama, and anyone else advocating a rapid transition away from the hydrocarbons that have dominated the world's energy mix since the dawn of the Industrial Age, is the same issue that dogs every alternative energy idea: scale.

Read through the statistics that Bryce presents. It's pretty clear that the nirvana of energy independence won't be happening any time soon.

But the problem of scale means that these hydrocarbons just won't go away. Sure, Mr. Obama can double the output from solar and wind. And then double it again. And again. And again. But getting from 76,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day to something close to the 47.4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day needed to keep the U.S. economy running is going to take a long, long time. It would be refreshing if the president or perhaps a few of the Democrats on Capitol Hill would admit that fact.

The new Blue Eagle

Taking a page from FDR's NRA, the White House has announced that they will stamp projects that are funded by the so-called stimulus money.

Just in case you doubted whether you were getting anything for all that money.

And here are some clever photoshopped alternatives.

Meanwhile, if you want a peek on how the money is going to be spent, Robert Cox looks at how one community, New Rochelle, New York is proposing to use that stimulus honeypot.

New Rochelle is the seventh largest city in New York State. Last week, city officials submitted a nearly $100 million list of proposed projects to Albany in the hopes of getting a slice of New York State's $24 billion share of the stimulus pie.

Out of the $97.8 million submitted, almost 20% of the projects are ineligible, few are actually shovel-ready and most contain highly improbably job creation estimates.

The list consists primarily of long dormant or unworkable plans coupled with goodies for real estate developers, dumped into a nearly nine-figure grab bag of spending initiatives that will do little to stimulate the economy.

They would do a lot to keep favored contractors working on the federal dime, however, while delivering the goods for deep-pocketed developers who have pumped thousands of dollars into New Rochelle Mayor Noam Bramson's campaign fund.

Mixed in among some genuine, qualifying infrastructure projects can be found items like a skating rink for $8 million, a boat storage facility for the cash-strapped yachting crowd, $1.5 million for soccer fields, basketball courts and picnic tables, more for bike paths and something called "streetscapes" to improve the look of the old downtown shopping area.

This in a city that has given away tens of millions of dollars in the form of tax abatements to encourage big box stories like Costco, Home Depot and Linens & Things to relocate far from downtown on the site of the old city dump.

Another $25 million is to build 228 apartments in order to "maintain an affordable housing resource in the City of New Rochelle in perpetuity." That is a lot of money so that lower-income people can live forever in one of the most affluent, most heavily taxed counties in the U.S.

This while the biggest problem facing the country is a glut of abandoned housing in places like Phoenix and Las Vegas. Why not take that 25 million dollars and offer these families a fistful of plane tickets to the sunny southwest and $100,000 each to buy their own home?

One of the projects was submitted to Albany without a price tag -- a plan to rebuild a road near a strip mall for some unspecified sum. Apparently, the plan is to see how much they get and then build as much road as they can afford.

Multiply this story by the hundreds and hundreds of communities out there trying to dip a spoon into all this lovely money sitting in the stimulus plan just waiting for communities to make up a bunch of poorly-planned projects that they hope will soon be sporting that nifty Obama logo.

Here's your future

Bill Quick sums up the Democratic plan for the country.

California spends far more than it takes in, despite having some of the highest taxes in the United States. It is hostile to business, and the middle class is fleeing in droves. It runs huge deficits every year, yet the Dem dominated legislature refuses to do anything effective to cut spending.

Now one in ten Californians is unemployed. Does any of this sound familiar? It should. It’s what Obama and the Democrats have in mind as a “solution” for the rest of the country.

(Link via Instapundit)

Another reason we need those professional journalists

Michael Calderone pulls back the curtain on what is, apparently, a common journalistic practice to write "beat sweetners" kissing up to administration aides in the hopes of gaining access and good links further on down the road.

n a profile last month, The Washington Post described deputy White House chief of staff Jim Messina as a “low-profile aide” who begins “fixing President Obama’s problems” before 7 a.m., works 14 hours straight and then hits the gym.

Not to be outdone, POLITICO noted the next day that White House chief legislative liaison Phil Schiliro — another “low-profile” official but one possessing “Buddha-like Zen” — is already working in the West Wing by 6 a.m.

Time says reporters admire White House press secretary Robert Gibbs (“The President’s Warrior”) because he “has the president’s ear and can get to the commander in chief when an answer is needed.” The New Yorker says White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is “a political John McEnroe, known for both his mercurial temperament and his tactical brilliance,” yet is also uncommonly indifferent to both criticism and praise.

Welcome to the “beat sweetener.”

In the early days of any administration, reporters reach out to the men and women who might become their sources over the next four years — then slather them with glowing profiles suitable for framing in their mothers’ bedrooms.

Even garden-variety government officials become political superheroes, each one harder-working and more down-to-earth than the last — and all of them enjoying the ear of the president.

A cozy custom, that. And I'm sure that the administration aides like to do their own share of stroking in order to get good coverage when the going gets tough. So next time you read about one of these super hero aides fighting for the best for the country with preternatural humility, skill, and charm.

The raging Senate moderats

Politico reports that there is a group of 16 Senate Democratic moderates who think that this $410 billion pork-laden omnibus budget bill is a bridge too far for them in terms of spending. They want to scale back the spending and they're willing to lose their clout in the Senate to change the bill that came out of the House.

While the White House was willing to shrug and just allow the House Democrats stuff in whatever they wanted into the bill, these moderates are not so happy. Evan Bayh, the leader of the group, has a column today expressing his queasiness with all this federal spending.

The omnibus increases discretionary spending by 8% over last fiscal year's levels, dwarfing the rate of inflation across a broad swath of issues including agriculture, financial services, foreign relations, energy and water programs, and legislative branch operations. Such increases might be appropriate for a nation flush with cash or unconcerned with fiscal prudence, but America is neither.

Drafted last year, the bill did not pass due to Congress's long-standing budgetary dysfunction and the frustrating delays it yields in our appropriations work. Since then, economic and fiscal circumstances have changed dramatically, which is why the Senate should go back to the drawing board. The economic downturn requires new policies, not more of the same.

Our nation's current fiscal imbalance is unprecedented, unsustainable and, if unaddressed, a major threat to our currency and our economic vitality. The national debt now exceeds $10 trillion. This is almost double what it was just eight years ago, and the debt is growing at a rate of about $1 million a minute.

Washington borrows from foreign creditors to fund its profligacy. The amount of U.S. debt held by countries such as China and Japan is at a historic high, with foreign investors holding half of America's publicly held debt. This dependence raises the specter that other nations will be able to influence our policies in ways antithetical to American interests. The more of our debt that foreign governments control, the more leverage they have on issues like trade, currency and national security. Massive debts owed to foreign creditors weaken our global influence, and threaten high inflation and steep tax increases for our children and grandchildren.

The solution going forward is to stop wasteful spending before it starts. Families and businesses are tightening their belts to make ends meet -- and Washington should too.

Just think - Obama could have picked this guy rather than Joe Biden to be his vice president and run herd on federal spending.

We'll see if this group of Democrats will hang tough when they're faced with threats of the government shutting down if they don't pass this omnibus. Of course, the government doesn't haave to shut down. It can be run on a continuing resolution as it has been in the past. But you can't increase spending in a continuing resolution. What fun is that?

It would be an impressive thing for moderate Senate Democrats to care more about excessive spending than President Obama who seems willing to defer to the Congressional leaders among the Democrats to create much of his policy, from the stimulus to health care. Well, if the guy is going to be passive, it's time that some other Democrats step up to the challenge.

All spending, all the time

Rich Lowry really captures the essence of Obama - he wants to spend a lot of federal money any which way he can.

When President Barack Obama wanted to push an $800 billion “stimulus” or “recovery” bill through Congress a few weeks ago, he thought an atmosphere of economic crisis helped his cause. So he repeatedly warned of “catastrophe,” of “a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”

A little more than a week later, Obama moved onto his next priority, proposing a unbridled federal budget that will spend $3.6 trillion next year and $5.3 trillion more in the next ten years than the Congressional Budget Office was projecting just last year. To get revenue for this budgetary explosion, Obama assumes the economy will be recovering at a nice clip next year, at a 3.2 percent annual rate.

What happened to the looming cataclysm? The Obama team argues that the passage of the recovery package has suddenly brightened the economic future. But there’s no way that $220 billion in extra government spending — the amount in the stimulus bill for 2010 — can be the margin of difference between irreversible catastrophe and healthy growth in a $14 trillion economy.

Obama exaggerated the downside of the economy two weeks ago so he could get more spending, and now he’s exaggerating its upside so he can get more spending. The fixed goal is more spending. The means — the rhetoric, the arguments, the assumptions — are flexible so long as they serve that ultimate goal.

The past few weeks should have cleared away the debate over Obama’s intentions — is he a pragmatist or an ideologue? Obama is a pragmatist in pursuit of an ideological prize, willing to zig and zag so long as his lodestar of expanded government is ahead of him.

A trope of conservative commentary about the stimulus package was that Nancy Pelosi had rolled the neophyte Obama, producing a sprawling monstrosity that betrayed his talk of pragmatism. This missed the point — Obama’s deference to Pelosi was his pragmatism. By giving Pelosi running room and enduring a few embarrassments, he got what he wanted, which was as much new spending as quickly as the political system could bear. If barely any Republicans could support it, so what? Bipartisanship was a means, not an end.

If Obama felt ill-used by this process, he wouldn’t be proposing to duplicate it with his health-care plan. Obama wants to give Congress a few principles and a $634 billion health-care slush fund, and let Congress go at it and write his health-care plan. How it works out exactly doesn’t matter so much than it gets done — and government grows.

And why have increased spending? Because, in so doing, he increases the size of government - in education, energy, and health care. That is his goal and he doesn't care what rhetoric of policies he uses to achieve that.

Lesson for Obama - people do behave rationally if the right disincentives are in place

As would have been predictable to anyone with a modicum of economics training, a plan to have higher tax rates kick in at $250,000 will start a lot of people planning how to minimize their income to stay under or at least minimize their income at that rate. And that is just what ABC News has found.

A 63-year-old attorney based in Lafayette, La., who asked not to be named, told ABCNews.com that she plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law.

So far, Obama's tax plan is being looked at skeptically by both Democrats and Republicans and therefore may not pass at all.

"We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00," she said.

"We have to find a way out where we can make just what we need to just under the line so we can benefit from Obama's tax plan," she added. "Why kill yourself working if you're going to give it all away to people who aren't working as hard?"

The attorney says that in order to decrease her income she'll have to let go of clients, some of whom she's been counseling for more than a decade.

"This means I'll have to tell some of my clients we can't help them and being more selective in general about who we help," she said. "I hate to do it."

Obama's budget proposal calls for $989 billion in new taxes over the next 10 years, most of which will be earned from increased taxes on individuals who make more than $200,000 and from families who make more than $250,000.

The expiration of the Bush administration's tax cuts at the end of 2010 would garner an estimated $338 billion, $179 billion would come from the elimination of some itemized deductions for higher-income taxpayers and $118 billion would be brought in from a hike in the capital gains tax. The remaining $353 billion would come from taxes on businesses.

Dr. Sharon Poczatek, who runs her own dental practice in Boulder, Colo., said that she too is trying to figure out ways to get out of paying the taxes proposed in Obama's plan.

"I've put thought into how to get under $250,000," said Poczatek. "It would mean working fewer days which means having fewer employees, seeing fewer patients and taking time off."

"Generally it means being less productive," she said.

"The motivation for a lot of people like me - dentists, entrepreneurs, lawyers - is that the more you work the more money you make," said Poczatek. "But if I'm going to be working just to give it back to the government -- it's de-motivating and demoralizing."

Yup, just what we want to do in a recession, de-motivate people from working harder and employing more people.

And remember that government never gets as much money as anticipated from a tax increase because those in the wealthier brackets will find ways to get around paying the maximum amount.

Gary Schatsky, a financial adviser and the president of N.Y.-based Objectiveadvice.com, said that it is possible to successfully remove yourself from the bracket Obama plans to target in his new plan.

"It's very possible that there are plenty of things you can do with general tax planning techniques - attempting to recognizes loses, pushing gains to years when your income is lower and increasing retirement plan contributions - to come below $250,000," said Schatsky.

"But Obama's proposal has yet to be hammered out and the devil is in the details," he added.

Because we have a marginal tax system, said Schatsky, what Obama's plan means is that the amount of tax you pay on each incremental dollar is higher only when your income is pushed into a higher tax bracket.

"But to focus keeping your income below a quarter million dollars is not going to have any spectacular magic for individual tax payers," said Schatsky. "The difference between $249,999 and $251,000 will probably have zero tax impact."

Schatsky said that the incentive to get under $250,000 may be more so if the tax plan outlines that an individual who goes over a prescribed limit would face a reduced value of their itemized deductions.

"If the value of all your itemized deductions goes from a 33 percent level to a 28 percent level than there would be a reason for people to do dramatic things to reduce their incomes," said Schatsky.

This proposal to reduce the value of itemized deductions is going to be hard to get through Congress. Deductions on charitable donations are pretty close to sacred. But here is one more argument as to why it would be foolhardy to go ahead with the proposal. People will adjust their behavior and not in ways that will do anything to grow the economy.

Speaking softly and throwing away any sort of stick

The New York Times reveals that President Obama has offered Russia quite a deal. We would back off deploying missile defense in Eastern Europe if Putin would make an effort to stop Iran from developing nuclear missile capability.

The letter to President Dmitri A. Medvedev was hand-delivered in Moscow by top administration officials three weeks ago. It said the United States would not need to proceed with the interceptor system, which has been vehemently opposed by Russia since it was proposed by the Bush administration, if Iran halted any efforts to build nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles.

So now Obama is ready to put his faith in promises by Putin and then promises by Iran. What about Russia and Iran's behavior in the last couple of decades has given Obama any reason to believe anything they would say about nuclear research.

The Czech Republic and Polish leaders had courageously agreed to host the missile defense system despite definite risks to their own political careers. And now Obama is ready to toss them under the bus in exchange for kind promises from the Russians. Obama is allowing Russia to have the confident impression that they can safely get away with determining what Poland and the Czech Republic do in their foreign policy. Russia has been assisting the Iranians for years in developing their nuclear capability. Obama is demonstrating that he will happily deal with Russia from a position of weakness and forgo our defense capability if Iran does complete their development of such weapons. And how does he think we will have any confidence in what Russia and Iran say they are doing? And if his gamble is wrong, we will have thrown away our opportunity to defend against Iran's missile capability.

Obama is demonstrating again and again that he is the anti-Reagan. First he decides to fight the recession with increased government spending and increases in taxes. Now he is reversing the example of strength that Reagan showed at Reykjavik when Reagan refused to give up SDI.

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club comments,

After all, it is easy to verify a non-deployment of US missiles in Eastern Europe, but how do you verify non-assistance by Russia when it could take the form of technology or knowledge transfer, which can’t easily be measured? In other words, assuming the Obama administration could make a deal with Moscow to stop helping Teheran in exchange for stopping missile defense in Eastern Europe, how could they make sure the Russians wouldn’t cheat? It is far easier to restart technological help than it is is to pour concrete. There would be an asymmetry in the stability of concessions. That is, unless it was understood the Russians would pretend to comply and the US would pretend not to notice.

A second set of issues emerges if the Obama administration plans to deploy an advanced ABM radar in Russia, as the NYT describes. Quite apart from letting the Russians know how it works, it doesn’t protect the US or Western Europe from an Iranian attack made by arrangement with Moscow. It would give Russia long-term leverage over the security of the West against rogue nuclear weapons. It would hand them a chip they could use to negotiate against the US down the track. It is a little bit like supplying the noose you may be hung in. And if Moscow never arranges to collude with Teheran, it will have a de facto veto over the facility’s use, just as host countries have wherever American installations exist. Whether or not the US gives Russia the right to flip the switch on the facility, the fact of its location within Russia means the Kremlin will effectively have the power to shut it down. They could, for instance, simply put an artillery round on the radome, in the extreme.

The perhaps the most curious issue is the existence of the story itself. This leak means that someone in the administration was either (1) floating a trial balloon or (2) horrified that this was going forward. Either way it is something to watch.

And Flopping Aces chimes in,

Obama would be throwing away years of patient diplomatic effort based on little more than words and promises. Ask yourself this: do you think that the leaders in Europe who risked their careers and went out on a limb in agreeing to the Bush Administration plan would be likely to agree to revisit the plan once Obama cancels it and the need arises?

With Russia’s invasion of Georgia last year a number of the states of Central and Eastern Europe turned even more towards the West and sought closer security ties specifically with the United States. All that is undermined if this complex agreement is scrap[p]ed.

The looming crisis in public employee pensions

If we ever solve the problems in the housing market and banking industry, one of the next crises that will sink governments is the problem with guaranteed generous pensions promised to public service employees. As these employees start retiring, local and state governments will face devastating expenses in paying generous pensions for their employees. The problems facing New York City in their generous pension promises to public employees demonstrate what the city will be facing.

The latest alarm bell: a Post report last week about the soaring number of retired cops - more than 10,000, by last count - under the age of 50.

That's a huge and growing share of the total number of officers on pension.

Not only are their payouts fat; these cops can be expected to collect for 40 years, on average. Where will all the money come from to pay them?

And here's the surest sign that police pension costs are unsustainable: Each year, some 2,000 officers retire - while only 1,000 or so stop getting pensions upon death.

At the FDNY, meanwhile, retirees average a whopping $85,000 a year, with 72 percent getting higher-paying disability pensions. One retiree, The Post reported, rakes in $175,000 a year.

And remember: All public pensions in New York are guaranteed. That is, not only are they immune to market fluctuations, but the state Constitution prohibits them from ever being diminished - at least for current staff and retirees.

What a deal: Private-sector working stiffs would kill for such terms.

But this means that state and city government must replenish pension funds, which are invested in the markets, whenever Wall Street slips.

Such generosity cannot be maintained, yet it is a political disaster for any politician to advocate trimming these pension plans. Public employees, particularly police officers and fire fighters, deserve good and guaranteed pensions. But cities and states cannot fund such generosity for so many years. It is unsustainable. Just as our national politicians have to confront the promises we can't redeem on Medicare and Social Security, these local politicians will need to take on the public service employees unions.

And it's not just Obama's cabinet nominees with tax problems

While it's become a rather ho hum story these days to hear that another prominent Obama choice for his cabinet has some sort of tax problems, it seems that the story is not limited to just the nominees for the top posts but also for the nominees down the line. Paul Volker is complaining that Tim Geithner is working solo at the Treasury because his deputies haven't been approved.

"The secretary of the Treasury is sitting there without a deputy, without any undersecretaries, without any, as far as I know, assistant secretaries," Volcker said, "at a time of very severe crisis."

President Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, asked by a reporter for comment, said he "wouldn't quite agree with everything that our friend Mr. Volcker said," adding: "I don't think that the secretary is alone at the Treasury Department. I think there are many able people assisting him."

Maybe so, but Secretary Timothy F. Geithner still does not have a deputy or Senate-confirmed undersecretaries or assistant secretaries to help him. And it's not because the Senate has been going at its traditional, snail-like pace confirming people. (That will be, as sure as night follows day, a problem down the road.) The fact is, the White House has sent no nominations to the Senate for any of those positions.

And why not? It's not like Geithner didn't know early that he was the Treasury nominee and couldn't have busied himself with coming up with some creditable nominees with whom he'd like to work at Treasury. No, the problem is that they're rescrubbing possible nominees' personal records to see if they have the Geithner problem of not having paid their full taxes. While it might have been okay for the boss, they don't want to put forth more nominees with the same sort of problem. And boy, a lot of them seem to have that problem.

And the problem, as Volcker also noted, is a severe case of Daschle-itis -- with a strong dose of Geithner-itis -- that has sparked an intense spate of re-vetting of potential nominees. We've heard the process compared to some rather unpleasant medical procedures. According to one estimate, as many as a third of potential nominees were found to have had some tax questions to answer.

A third? Wow! Our options are that up to a third of Democratic nominees for upper level appointees in the Treasury Department are cheating on their taxes or they're just too dumbfounded by the tax code to fill their forms out correctly. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and opt for the latter option. Even more reason for these guys to get in and start reforming that tax code.

Dick Durbin admits that his party is a bunch of wusses

How funny. Dick Durbin has admitted that the only reason why the Democrats in the Senate caved on seating Roland Burris was because Congressman Bobby Rush successfully mau-maued them into fearing that they'd be tarred as racists if they didn't.

Durbin, a fellow Democrat and Illinois' senior senator, noted that Rep. Bobby Rush, a Chicago Democrat, appeared at Gov. Rod Blagojevich's announcement of his appointment of Burris and used racially charged language to defend the appointment.

"My colleague from Illinois, Congressman Bobby Rush, made strong statements along those (racial) lines," Durbin said on WGN-AM (720). "They were painful and hurtful, and it became part of this calculation."

Durbin also said he would work with Burris despite the political isolation surrounding the state's junior senator in Washington.

How refreshingly honest of Durbin to admit that a wild accusation of racism that no one really bought into except former Black Panther Bobby Rush was enough to send them scrambling for racial cover. While it's sweet to see the Democrats just as vulnerable as Republicans to the race card, it's rather appalling to realize how fears of being called racists played into the whole algorithm for seating Illinois's newest senator. And now the Democrats are stuck with him and can't criticize him too much. Despite Durbin's earlier pleas for Burris to resign, they need his vote. Just like the Republicans who can't risk offending Jim Bunning, the Democrats are stuck with their own embarrassing colleague. And with acknowledging that they're a party of wusses who will cave as soon as someone tosses a race card in their direction. (Link via Hot Air)

Shocker! Another Obama cabinet nominee had tax problems

Boy, who could imagine this story. Now former Dallas mayor and the nominee for Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, has admitted that he failed to pay taxes on speech honoraria. His mistake was due to his sending the money to his alma mater and not realizing that he had to pay taxes on it along with some other minor mistakes.

Kirk's tax problems, according to the committee, were largely based on his failure to pay taxes on honoraria that he earned from speaking. He had not paid taxes on the income because he had asked that the fees be diverted to his alma mater, Austin College, to fulfill a pledge to a scholarship fund.

The committee said he also deducted too much from his taxes from the purchase of season tickets to NBA Mavericks games. And it said he incorrectly apportioned accounting fees between his partnership forms and his personal income tax forms.

Kirk also overstated the value of a television he donated, valuing it at $3,000 instead of $1,500, the committee found. And he did not have an acknowledgment letter for a $900 donation.

While I would have thought that most experienced political figures would know that you have to pay taxes on money earned even if you're donating it to a charity, it doesn't sound like a mistake committed from avarice or an unbelievable profession of ignorance as Tom Daschle and Tim Geithner's tax errors appeared to be. What it does demonstrate once again is how complicated our code is. If the politicians given the responsibility for enforcing the tax code for their particular jurisdictions can't understand it, what chance do the rest of us have? And now the Obama budget plan includes even more tinkering with the tax code. Apparently, they haven't learned the lesson for the need to simplify, not complicate the thing.

The GOP hopes that Jim Bunning strikes out

Senator Jim Bunning is way past his due date as a United States senator. His latest foot-in-the-mouth blunder was speculating that Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be dead within nine months. Ugh! That was even more tasteless and cringe-inducing than when he described his 2004 opponent as looking like one of Saddam Hussein's sons and seemed "limp-wristed."

While the GOP would like to lose this guy from the ticket in 2010, he refuses to disappear. His response to strong hints from the Republican Party that they won't help him in his reelection campaign is to intimate that, if the GOP annoys him, he'll resign and let the Democratic governor of Kentucky name a Democrat as a replacement to give the Democrats an even 60 senators. Charming.

Now, if the Senate GOP leadership continued to make it difficult for him to raise money, he would have the “last laugh,” and then added that Kentucky’s governor was a Democrat, a source recalled Bunning saying.

The implication that he would resign was talked about by “several people” after the event, the source said.

The remarks stunned his listeners, the source said.

“Why would he say that?” attendees asked each other, according to the source.

One source said he contacted a Bunning campaign official and warned, “This is going to get out — there were 15 to 20 people who heard this and it’s newsworthy.”

“It’s not because he’s old and senile — he’s always been like that. He’ll tell you what he thinks,” the source said.

But Bunning’s resistance to retirement is “sad to see,” the source said.

“The problem I see with all this media attention is, it just makes him more stubborn rather than make him ready to make a rational decision,” the source said.

Just what we want - a guy who isn't ready to make rational decisions.

Jay Cost has been blogging about how the Jim Bunning situation points to why we would benefit from stronger parties who would have the power to ease Bunning out and bring in a stronger candidate - one that is less of a whack job. Cost argues for reform of the primary process in order to give parties more power to weed out weak incumbents who are desperately clinging to their position.

This is one big reason I do not understand why partisans on both sides suffer the primary process. It has become one of many mechanisms that effectively guarantee incumbents will be on the general election ballot. What this means, in turn, is that the party usually has to tolerate guys like Don Sherwood, Stevens, and Bunning. There is no "low cost" way for Republicans to hold their incumbents accountable, which means only the Democrats do. And the same goes with Democrats when their incumbents behave badly.

Simply put, primaries are good for politicians, bad for the parties, and therefore bad for the tens of millions of people who sympathize with one party or the other. For all the talk that I hear from partisans about keeping their leaders accountable, I hardly hear any discussion about the primaries - and how inefficient they are at keeping them in line. Once a politician wins election, it becomes much more difficult for the party to make him responsible to the party. And in the case of a guy like Bunning, most Republicans have probably been reduced to praying that he'll just drop out - that's how little power they have over their elected officials.

It's a nice solution that other political scientists might endorse, but no actual politicians would dare come out and take a position that would be caricatured as a vote for more smoke-filled rooms - newly smoke-free, of course - in place of the people's choice. However, incumbents have such strong advantages that it is a rare incumbent who is defeated in political primaries. Bunning may be able to achieve that distinction if he keeps up embarrassing himself each time he opens his mouth while threatening to turn the Senate over to the Democrats. That can't be a popular position to be defending withing Republican primaries.

So, despite his inborn incumbency advantages, Bunning may open his big mouth just enough to help a worthy challenger defeat him in a party primary. Surely Mitch McConnell can find some other Republican who could take on this dodo.

Hope and change are clichés

The Economist has an interesting chart of the use of the words "hope" and "change" in presidential inaugural addresses. Obama is a mere piker compared to such hope and change artists as William Howard Taft and Dwight Eisenhower. You might expect that presidents coming to power in a change of party from the previous administration might be more inclined to talking about hope and change, but the statistics don't bear that out. A lot of presidents being inaugurated into their second term also seemed to be full of hope and change as if they were dissatisfied with what they had done during their first terms.

Perhaps speechwriters in the future will look for some new clichés.

The one domestic government program Democrats are willing to cut

With a budget that seeks to expand government spending in all directions, there is one little program that Democrats can't wait to cut - the tiny D.C. voucher program. They don't care about results or parent satisfaction; all they care about is kowtowing to the teacher unions. And the Washington Post lets them have it.

REP. DAVID R. Obey (Wis.) and other congressional Democrats should spare us their phony concern about the children participating in the District's school voucher program. If they cared for the future of these students, they wouldn't be so quick as to try to kill the program that affords low-income, minority children a chance at a better education.

....But the debate unfolding on Capitol Hill isn't about facts. It's about politics and the stranglehold the teachers unions have on the Democratic Party. Why else has so much time and effort gone into trying to kill off what, in the grand scheme of government spending, is a tiny program? Why wouldn't Congress want to get the results of a carefully calibrated scientific study before pulling the plug on a program that has proved to be enormously popular? Could the real fear be that school vouchers might actually be shown to be effective in leveling the academic playing field?

This week, the Senate takes up the omnibus spending bill, and we hope that, with the help of supporters such as Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), the program gets the reprieve it deserves. If it doesn't, someone needs to tell Ms. Parker why a bunch of elected officials who can send their children to any school they choose are taking that option from her.

A bunch of inner city minority kids get the opportunity to get out of a dismal public school system and have their lives changed. But the Democrats just can't wait to deep-six the program. Rather telling, isn't it?

Replacing charity with government

The Obama administration truly is seeking to make government the replacement for charity donations. First they're planning to reduce the donation deduction for wealthier taxpayers. But since that raises concerns about how charities are going to survive, they're planning to replace the missed donations with government handouts.

In Obama's budget document, "A New Era of Responsibility -- Renewing America's Promise," the administration outlined a plan capping the tax rate that families with incomes over $250,000 can claim for itemized deductions at 28 percent. Those individuals subject to the 33 or 35 percent bracket who now claim itemized deductions at this rate will would find five to seven percent of their charitable contributions subject to income tax.

For example, a prospective charitable donor in the 35 percent bracket who gives a homeless shelter $100,000 under current law would reduce his income taxes by $35,000.

Under the Obama plan, the donor would only be able to deduct his gift at the 28 percent rate, meaning a $28,000 savings in taxes. This would mean an additional $7,000 in taxes and an almost 11 percent increase in taxes on the donation.

So, since people are rational, this will cause a decrease in donations. How to help the charities? Let government do it.

Lost in the coverage of the Obama Administration's 2010 budget proposal to limit the tax rate at which taxpayers can take itemized deductions for charitable giving is the administration's plan to create a government-financed fund that would mitigate losses charitable groups might suffer as a result of the tax increase on charitable giving.

"Obama is telling charities, 'Don't worry about the tax increase on your donors, government will be here to make up the difference if you have a down year because of my policies,'" says a Senate Joint Tax Committee staffer. "We're still trying to figure this one out, because it doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense."

Now, it might not make a lot of sense to raise the taxes with one hand in the hopes of gaining more revenue if you're going to then turn around and replace that revenue with a fund to dole out the sums to the charities. But it does make sense if your goal is to give the government control over which charities rate getting the donations rather than all that sloppy freedom we have when people choose which charities they want to contribute to.

According to a Senate Democrat aide, who has been briefed on the federal fund to offset charitable losses, the government funds would come with strings attached. "If, say, a Catholic hospital sought and received those funds, it would be required to adhere to federal polices on issues like abortion. Or the hospital could simply not seek the funds to make up the difference," says the aide.

I'm sure we'll see arguments about how much more rational it is to have government doling out the sums rather than letting some rich person pick where he wants his money to go. But America is a very charitable country and one of the beauties of how it works is that people can pick where they want their money to go whether it's to their kid's school, the local art museum, their family church or research for fighting a disease that their dad died from. People might argue over which of those recipients is worthier. But it's their money so let them decide. Let's not take that choice away from them by tinkering with the tax code and then replacing people's choices with some government fund that seeks to figure out the most deserving recipients.

It's Super-Obama

Mark Steyn sees President Obama as a post-modern sort of superhero.

Back in September, we were told to put our faith in Bailoutman. Then in January, Bailoutman went to his tailor, had the long underwear redesigned, and relaunched himself as Mister Stimulus. A few weeks later the Obama crowd noticed that “stimulus,” like “bailout,” had become a cheap punch line, and decided the approved term was “recovery.” So Captain Recovery swung into action.

In fairness to Ant-Man, he got very small, and then he got big, and then he got small again, and then he got super-big, and for a while he was both small and big, in a superheroically bipartisan way. But Bailoutman started out as a huge staggering behemoth and has inflated from there. Once upon a time he was as a meek, mild-mannered trillionaire, but a mere five months later he was a meek, mild-mannered multi-trillionaire.

If you find it hard to keep track of these all these evolutions, the President in his address to Congress finally spilled the beans and unveiled our new hero in his final form: the Incredible Bulk, Statezilla, Governmentuan, a colossus bestriding the land like a, er, colossus. What superpowers does he have? All of them! He can save the economy, he can reform health care, he can prevent foreclosures, he can federalize daycare, he can cap the salary of his archenemies the sinister Fat Cats who “pad their pay checks and buy fancy drapes.” No longer will the citizenry cower in fear of fancy drapes: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! With one solar panel on the roof of his underground headquarters, Governmentuan can transform the American energy sector and power his amazing Governmentmobile, the new environmentally friendly supercar that soon we’ll all be driving because we’ll be given government car loans to buy the government cars! He’ll have hundreds of thousands of boy sidekicks, none of whom will ever be allowed to drop out of high school because (in the words of his famous catchphrase) “that’s no longer an option!” “Gee, thanks, Governmentuan!” says Diplomaboy the Boy Wonder, as he goes off to college to study Gender As A Social Construct until he’s 34.

And our hero can do this all without raising taxes on any family earning under $250,000!

Look — up in the sky: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a sudden eclipse plunging you and three adjoining states into total darkness? No, it’s the Incredible Bulk flailing through the air, fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. Well, actually, it’s more like the European way. But Americans will get used to it after a while.

Of course, when Barack Obama is accused of creating his Six-Trillion-Dollar Man “because I believe in bigger government” he denies it: “I don’t,” he says flatly. This is like Clark Kent telling Lois Lane he’s not Superman: They just look a bit similar when he removes his glasses. Likewise, any connection between Obama and a Big Government behemoth swallowing everything in sight is entirely coincidental.

And because he's just a creature of fancy, we don't have to worry about any nasty reality coming in to point out that the willing suspension of disbelief is getting harder and harder.

Is the new all-powerful Statezilla vulnerable to anything? Unfortunately, yes. He loses all his superpowers when he comes into contact with something called Reality. But happily, Reality is nowhere in sight. There are believed to be some small surviving shards somewhere on the planet — maybe on an uninhabited atoll somewhere in the Pacific — but that’s just a rumor, and Barack Obama isn’t planning on running into Reality any time soon.

More from the "What if this were Republicans" files

Can you imagine if, when Bush and the Republicans controlled both the White House and Capitol Hill, they had tried to pass a major policy change by bypassing Senate rules allowing the filibuster? That would have been political Armageddon as was threatened if they had carried out their threats to change the rules for judicial nominations to disallow a filibuster. But now it seems that the Obama administration is thinking of trying to pass their health and energy policies as part of the budget resolution rather than as a separate bill. If it's done as part of the budget, then it only needs 50 votes and can't be filibustered. Clever, huh?

President Obama’s budget director said the White House would consider using a Senate procedural tactic so that only 50 votes would be rquired to pass major healthcare and energy reforms.

Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the administration would prefer not to use the budget reconciliation process to push through its package.

But he added: "We have to keep everything on the table. We want to get these.... important things done this year." Orszag called healthcare in particular "the key to our fiscal future."

Orszag made the comments on ABC’s "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

Because they can not be filibustered, budget reconciliations only require 50 votes to pass the Senate. Democrats hold strong majorities in Congress, but still come up short of the 60 votes necessary in the Senate to end debate, which makes it easier for Republicans to block legislation. House rules in comparison make it harder for the minority party to stop bills.

Still, using budget reconciliation to pass policy proposals is controversial, even among some Democrats who believe doing so strains Senate rules and tradition.

Of course, we know how Pelosi and Reid would have howled in protest and how the media would have trumpeted the trickiness and unfairness of such maneuvering. But I bet that this is what they'll do and the media will just gasp in awe about how clever the Obama folk are being in getting their agenda through despite Senate rules.

I guess that being post-racial means never stopping talk about race

If you thought that electing the first African-American president, a man who campaigned as wanting to attain a post-racial America, meant that we were going to stop talking about race, well, think again. Now we're going to be lectured about race from members of this new supposedly post-racial administration.

When the country's racial chasms seemed to threaten President Obama's election, his team had to tread carefully. A month into his administration, the tone has changed. Top officials are engaging the subject of race more freely, with a boldness and confidence they once shunned.

With the federal government's annual African American History Month celebrations as a backdrop, the attorney general, the first lady and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency spoke more frankly about race recently than any of Obama's surrogates did during the hard-fought campaign.

Lisa P. Jackson, the EPA administrator and a native of New Orleans, told her staff about having grown up in an area where she would have had to drink from unsafe water fountains because of her race. "Now in 2009, I am, along with you, responsible for ensuring that all Americans have clean water to drink," Jackson said. "Change has certainly come to this agency."

First lady Michelle Obama hosted middle-schoolers in the White House East Room and taught the children about African Americans and their roles in the executive mansion: the slaves who built it, the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation there, the meetings held with civil rights leaders.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who ignited the most debate, used his Feb. 18 address as an admonition that "to get to the heart of this country, one must examine its racial soul."

If the purpose of all these sorts of statements was to celebrate how far we've come, that would be great. But I suspect that the goal is to keep alive an ever-present sense of victimhood. Do you think that the Eric Holder Justice Department would uphold an employee's rights if that employee had spoken out on race and then had been judged to have created a hostile work environment for not towing the liberal line on race? Eric Holder might want to have a more courageous discussion on race, but that wouldn't include the courage of leaders publicly opposing racial affirmative action or challenging the racial demagoguery of mem like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. It sure wouldn't include a frank discussion of why, 60 years past the civil rights movement's greatest accomplishments, there is such a high rate of black illegitimacy and underachievement in schools.

We're now discovering that being post-racial just means more of the same.