During appearances last week in Arizona and New Mexico, President Obama spoke out against America racking up too much debt. If you follow the news at all, I don’t need to tell you how funny that is. If not, follow me.
Giving the commencement address at Arizona State University last Wednesday, Obama had this advice for the future of America:
…We gather here tonight in times of extraordinary difficulty, for the nation and the world. The economy remains in the midst of a historic recession, the result, in part, of greed and irresponsibility that rippled out from Wall Street and Washington, as we spent beyond our means and failed to make hard choices…
In the face of these challenges, it may be tempting to fall back on the formulas for success that have dominated these recent years. Many of you have been taught to chase after the usual brass rings: being on this “who’s who” list or that top 100 list; how much money you make and how big your corner office is; whether you have a fancy enough title or a nice enough car.
You can take that road — and it may work for some of you. But at this difficult time, let me suggest that such an approach won’t get you where you want to go; that in fact, the elevation of appearance over substance, celebrity over character, short-term gain over lasting achievement is precisely what your generation needs to help end…
We’ve become accustomed to our economic dominance in the world, forgetting that it wasn’t reckless deals and get-rich-quick schemes that got us there; but hard work and smart ideas — quality products and wise investments. So we started taking shortcuts. We started living on credit, instead of building up savings.
Obama repeated this message of frugality and self-sacrifice the next day in New Mexico:
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.”
Makes sense, right? Only two problems. Here’s the first one, a chart of projected yearly budget deficits from the Congressional Budget Office:
Here’s a hint: See the line for 2009? Notice how it’s 4 times as long as the line for 2008? That’s deficit spending. Money that we don’t actually have. Spending beyond our means. AKA debt. Notice how even the shortest projected line over the next 10 years is still longer than the longest line over the last 10? I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t mean the deficit will be less. And this is just an early projection. It just keeps going up and up.
Obama is going around telling everybody that his own plans are going to be a disaster. And apparently they’re all okay with it, because he’s handsome and charming and an above-average public speaker. Why, you might say it’s the elevation of appearance over substance, celebrity over character, short-term gain over lasting achievement. Where have I heard that one before?
Here’s the second problem: Obama hasn’t even practiced what he preaches in his own personal life.
A close examination of their finances shows that the Obamas were living off lines of credit along with other income for several years until 2005, when Obama’s book royalties came through and Michelle received her 260% pay raise at the University of Chicago. This was also the year Obama started serving in the U.S. Senate…
In April 1999, they purchased a Chicago condo and obtained a mortgage for $159,250. In May 1999, they took out a line of credit for $20,750. Then, in 2002, they refinanced the condo with a $210,000 mortgage, which means they took out about $50,000 in equity. Finally, in 2004, they took out another line of credit for $100,000 on top of the mortgage.
Tax returns for 2004 reveal $14,395 in mortgage deductions. If we assume an effective interest rate of 6%, then they owed about $240,000 on a home they purchased for about $159,250.
This means they spent perhaps $80,000 beyond their income from 1999 to 2004.
In other words, he lived exactly the way he’s now telling us all not to live. But he can hardly hold up his own example for us to learn from, can he? “Don’t be like me, kids, or you might just get two best-selling books and the Presidency of the United States out of it. That is, if you can keep a straight face while telling the biggest whoppers anybody’s ever heard.”
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AMEN!
I’m tired of hearing complaints about Bush adminstration defecit spending, and war spending out of the Democrats mouths and watching them spend 4 times as much with NO criticism from the media.
Obviously this means one of two things:
1) What the media says is true and the president has the super power to transmute matter into pure gold.
2) We are going to get more taxes, a lot more taxes.
Yay for Change!
Well, yeah, it’s always easy to spend OPM……Other People’s Money!
I believe Prez O like I believe the media constantly telling us the economy is getting better when there are still no new jobs, the stock market continues to stay in the basement zone, and no laid off workers are being called back to work.
Yup, it’s all about change…. this time, the one in your pockets.
I like how the deficit “shrinks” during re-election year (2012), but is still higher than any Bush year. I am not a math expert, but I am pretty sure that means that the government will be borrowing more money than it did during “these recent years”. Maybe instead of borrowing from China, we’ll borrow from Canada. Voila, change!
Brian, most of this deficit spending is scheduled for after the recession ends (or after it would have ended, if the economy had not been so burdened by unprecedented levels of debt and the resulting taxation and/or inflation). So no, it’s not good economics.
Yeah America! Look who we have as President. Do as I say, not as I do as I am the One. Yeah, the One who will be taxing us as well as telling us how to live and what to drive.
What makes me want to cry is him telling his staff to go through the budget line by line to eliminate $100 million. Out of $1.85 trillion. NR said it would be anagolous to cutting one word out of his “race speech” from the primaries, his Berlin address, his acceptance speech, inauguration address, and State of the Union speech. 3 cheers for fiscal responsibility!!
Didn’t Margaret Thatcher once say, “Sooner or later, liberals always run out of other people’s money”? Or words to that effect? Because the Democrats seem determined to test that theory. I think we’re having reparations imposed on us without a vote and without debate.
What Thatcher said “And I will go on criticising Socialism, and opposing Socialism because it is bad for Britain—and Britain and Socialism are not the same thing. (…) It’s the Labour Government that have brought us record peace-time taxation. They’ve got the usual Socialist disease—they’ve run out of other people’s money.”
In effect – socialism is fine until you run out of other peoples money
Obama is pandering (and lying) in the worst way. I wonder if anyone who voted for him is feeling any buyers remorse.
The real scary part is that I believe that PEBO really thinks what he is doing is going to make America better, just like Carter thought that if he forced America to learn to live with less they would be better people. Instead of trying to ration gas now PEBO is going to force cap and trade to tax us into not being able to afford gas, or luxury items.
History, for Democrats it seems to be the class they skipped because it was too boring to learn about dead people.
Bread and circuses, folks. Bread and circuses.
I am off to see if I can find any coverage by the “mainstream” media
Thanks, Jenn. I knew it was something along those lines. And I don’t think BO is well-meaning at all. I believe that his intention–and that of the other liberal elitists–is to tear down America to its very bones, and “rebuild” it the way they think it ought to be: With them permanently in charge, with dissent well and truly stifled, and with American traditions and history utterly wiped out.
Jenn – look at the Tea Parties. Not all of the people who attended were Republican. There are some Democrats who are realizing that they voted for the wrong guy and are very upset by what Obama has and has not done these first few months. Of course, try to find that on MSM and you will not.
I also just read that Pelosi’s approval rating has plummeted to 39%. Biden is just as bad as Pelosi with their mouths. Obama just lies with his. Without his teleprompter, he cannot form a single literate sentence.
Army Wife,I am glad to know that it is not just conservatives and libertarians at the tea parties. People are coming to their senses. I too just read about Pelosi’s approval rate – she through gasoline on her own fire with her press conference regarding EIT’s and what she knew. How soon before she resigns?
In the event that she does have to resign, I want very much to hear someone tell Pelosi that lies have consequences. Failing that, I long to see her ousted next year, and THEN I want someone to tell her, “Elections have consequences.” Because that’s the snotty little line she threw out after the 06 Congressional elections, when she decided to strap her bitch on and start vigorously rogering the American people. I hate that woman with the blazing intensity of a thousand white-hot suns. Baggy-faced lying old skank.
I hear you Beige. She exemplifies everything wrong with politics in this country. She needs to go – either resign or lose her seat in an election. Scary to think she is just 2 heartbeats away from the presidency.
The best thing for her to do is to resign, however, based on her powertripping, planeriding ego, she probably will not. One of those entitlement things. Obama does not have the balls to fire her or demand to step down. I love the fact that the CIA is coming out against her as they should. She is another one that when I look at I see nothing but rock. Her face would crack under the weight of a smile.
Obama’s ability to criticize “appearance over substance”, considering his own carefully-choreographed rise to power, is nothing short of astonishing. And funny, in a bitter sort of way. In a political galaxy aflame with hypocrisy, his star sure shines the brightest.
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for San Francisco to vote out Nancy.
The spin will be “Obama tried living that way and learned he couldn’t, so he’s learned from his mistakes and it trying to teach us because he’s The One”.
That doesn’t explain the debt he’s racking up NOW, of course.
Back from mainstream media sites and found a total of 0 articles that address this point….
I am shocked
It is so nice to know that all the journalists out there preferred to follow the same story line, ASU not giving Obama an honorary degree and how he amazingly turned it from a negative to a positive (oh what a great orator our new president is…*swoon*). Amazingly even Fox News missed it, though they were less fawning then other news outlets. It is so good to know that all of todays’ journalist think alike and couldn’t come up with an original take if their lives depended on it.
Look into these people’s eyes: dark (metaphorically), furious, contemptuous. Hey, Michelle, for the first time in my adult life I am scared for my country because it feels like evil has taken root at the White House. Thanks.
Thank God there’s other people besides me who see Pelosi for what she is…..looking just like a grinning shiteating dog EVERYtime she gets her way about something.
Pelosi reminds me of someone else – oh yeah. Hillary. Scary! And remember, Obama inherited this mess. This administration is all about blaming others and playing victim.
That seems to be a recurring Obama tactic: Adopt the same stance as his opponents and act like he thought of it. Say it with a straight face and a serious tone, and somebody will believe it.
Oh yeah, Simon, that’s true…..I had a university humanities professor once say in lecture that if you say something often enough, and with authority, people WILL believe you.
Well, with the amount of stuttering Obama does in his speeches, I would say that he repeats himself quite a bit!
Not only is looking at that deficit chart terrifying, but I find it really scary that Obama has the nerve to talk about “appearance over substance, celebrity over character, short-term gain over lasting achievement” when he is the biggest fame-whore narcissist of them all! And he’s so confident in his ability to get away with it that he spews this irony in a public speech, knowing that nobody in the media will point out his hypocrisy. This guy can get away with anything and he knows it, and that is absolutely frustrating. Thank God for Deceiver. Thank GOD.
Only Republicans go running when their tails between their legs when they do so much as look at someone wrong. Lie about national security and the CIA? In a liberal’s world that’s just life.
Even now, half the people against Obama are too meek, reserved, nice, and some other word I’m looking for that I can’t put my finger on. “He’s our president, we can’t say anything against him” — BS. I don’t go along with the ridicule of the last 8 years, but fighting for what’s right and not believing that everyone has some inherent good in them is absolutely appropriate for instances like this budget story! If the 48% who voted for McCain would actually point it out, more people would hear. Grr.
Jenn– I’ve heard quite a few people call into radio shows I listen to realizing the salesman they elected and it’s so refreshing. Wish they’d realized this *before* they pulled the lever, but it gives me some hope that maybe the effects of the Kool-Aid can wear off.
Is everything Obama is faced with extraodinary and of historic purportions?
Jimmy, Obama has a narccistic personality that has been fed by the media. All the sycophants blathering on about The One, the messiah,getting a tingle up their leg etc. He believes the hype about himself.
The debt the Obama Failministration is going to leave this country with is beyond tragic. We will probably never recover from it and generations to come will be paying and paying and paying. The mainstream media and left-wingers loved to denigrate the tea party protests as “whining”. So it’s “whining” to be concerned about unfathomable debt and the taxes that will inevitably be raised in an attempt to pay for it? No, they aren’t whiners, they are people who are actually paying attention to what’s going on, as opposed to the mindless idiots who never question anything the Obamessiah does.
If Bush were making th same mistakes, same misquotes, and missreadings as Obama has been doing (57 states anyone?) he would be raked over the coals by the media and the late night commedians. Everyone is keeping away from Obama. They are starstruck by him. Listen to some of the things being said about him – “I cried when he was inaguarated, finally someone who is like me”….. And these are reporters!
It is enlighting to see that some who voted for him are finally pulling the rose colored glasses off and realizing just what he is all about. Empty suit with no experience who loves to talk a good game (when the teleprompter is working) and not do a darn thing that is in the best interest of this country.
@California Dave: Yeah, they’ll need Obama’s example to light their paths, because Dave Ramsey hasn’t said A SINGLE WORD about that over the past ten or fifteen years. Nope. Mum’s the word.
“That seems to be a recurring Obama tactic: Adopt the same stance as his opponents and act like he thought of it. Say it with a straight face and a serious tone, and somebody will believe it.”
Yeah, but political tactics learned from watching “Gilligan’s Island” really shouldn’t get you that far. Is he going to yell “Drop those coconuts!” at Biden?
Baa
Baa
Baa
(all I have heard since November is the Sheeple)