Update on How the National Debt Affects You: Obama is “Irresponsible, Unpatriotic”

Candidate Barack Obama declared on 3 July 2008 during a campaign stop in Fargo, North Dakota that President Bush had run up the national debt by some $4 trillion, and he was pretty angry about it.  Let him explain it:

The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents – number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back – $30,000 for every man, woman and child.  That's irresponsible.  It's unpatriotic.

If increased spending of that magnitude is unpatriotic, what then does one call attempts to restrain that spending from going higher at an accelerated pace?  (After all, Bush increased the debt by some $4 trillion over eight years; Obama is pushing for over $5 trillion in only three years.)  Why, that would be unpatriotic too.

Let us examine some figures that Stuart Varney reviewed this morning on Fox News:

·         On election day of 4 November 2008, the average debt owed by every American was over $30K; by the inauguration on the following 20 January 2009, it stood at $34K.  It now stands at over $48K.

·         The national debt has increased 43% over the last three years.

·         In FY 2011, we were paying $1.2 billion a day in interest payments.

·         In the last twenty years, we have paid $7 trillion in interest on the debt.

·         The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the national debt, now at over $15.2 trillion, will be over $21.3 trillion by the end of FY 2021.

Three years ago, Obama and the Democrats were full of sturm und drang about the increasing debt.  So how much of Obama’s State of the Union speech was dedicated to this unprecedented crisis in the financial stability of the Republic?  Nothing.  He calls for more sacrifice, that we should all emulate the military and march together to his common goal, while reminding us again that bin Laden was slain while he was the President.

The only time he mentioned the debt was to complain about the debt left him from the Bush administration – nothing about his own – or to call for increased taxes on the wealthy.  If the government were to confiscate the total wealth of the Forbes 400, it would amount to only $1.5 trillion, which would pay down less than 10% of the still-increasing national debt.  Compare that to the budget shortfall of just 2011 alone of $1.56 trillion.

His use of Warren Buffet’s secretary as a silent shill would have been embarrassingly transparent if it wasn’t spoken by Obama, or defended by the relentlessly partisan Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.  Obama first mentions that Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, then in the very next sentence calls for a “billionaire to pay as much as his secretary in taxes”.  Leaving aside the fact that Buffet’s tax on dividends is lower on income he receives that has already been taxed before at the corporate tax rate, this clumsy attempt at social sleight of hand foreshadows coming class war ramping up still further.

Buffett, as I have already reported, is already in arrears to the US Treasury for taxes going back to 2002, amounting to about $1 billion.  This is the paragon of tax virtue that Obama wants to extoll?