Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Predicting a $2,000,000,000,000 Deficit

You heard it here first: the United States Government's Federal Deficit for fiscal year 2009 (ending 9/30) will be much closer to $2 Trillion than $1 Trillion. As bad as Bush's budgets were, Obama's first year will be worse than any three of Bush's. He has already warned us of a greater than 1 trillion dollar deficit, which will Tom Coburn predicts will be $1.6 Trillion. Add to that $290 Billion for the first 9 months of Obama's stimulus bill, $100 Billion or so for Iraq and Afghanistan, and a conservative $100 Billion to bail out various industries that will come to Washington with their hands out (I expect GM and Chrysler to be back, builders, and God knows who else). That brings my estimate to a staggering $2.1 Trillion dollars. As Senator Coburn has said, “The greatest moral issue of our time isn’t abortion, it’s robbing our next generation of opportunity. You’re going to save a child from being aborted so they can be born into a debtor’s prison?” As I wrote Monday, the "Keynesian multiplier" is now 0.2. We are saddling our children with $2 Trillion more debt to grow (or more likely, slow the collapse of) the economy by $0.4 Trillion. That is immoral.

Two related side notes:
CNN will air I.O.U.S.A. this weekend. This is the most important documentary in years, and it's well done.

Proving that he is truly insane, Harry Reid is repeating his try to pass a Coburn Omnibus bill. Senator Coburn has a really simple litmus test for bills that he'll obstruct. If a bill spends money on a duplicated program, he will hold obstruct it by any means necessary. Reid is trying to combine a bunch of bills that have been held up by Dr. Coburn to pass. Call your Senators and ask them to stand with the honorable Dr. No and against Dirty Harry.

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