Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Unpleasant options.

Once again, someone used the dark arts of "math" to pop the favored plans of statists.

So while the CBO projects that current policies will yield deficits of roughly 1 percent of GDP by 2019, Orszag[designated by Obama to run the Office of Management and Budget] anticipates they will be 5 times higher. And that’s after Obama scrubs the federal budget line by line to cut our waste, after he restores economic growth, after he introduces extraordinary new efficiencies to health care, after he restores the solvency of our entitlement programs, and after he fixes the educational system and America’s crumbling infrastructure.

In other words, once Obama has delivered us a better world, the budget will look far, far worse than we think possible today.

There are only a few possible explanations. The first is that Obama genuinely thinks his agenda is terrible for America (possible, but very unlikely). The second is that either his economic team or the CBO is completely incompetent (also unlikely). The third possibility — and the only one that really makes sense — is that Obama is intentionally painting a doomsday scenario here — either to pave the way for huge tax increases, or to make himself look like a miracle worker even if things get much worse from here on out.


What was that about a president hyping up threats in order to get more power...

Oh you mean it doesn't count when a Dem does it?

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