What if I told you that we’re spending as much on defense now as we were when Jimmy Carter was President?  Yeah, I’d laugh, too.  But the Cato Institute notes that, as a percentage of the gross domestic product, defense spending is indeed at late-1970s levels.

What’s also interesting to see is that non-defense spending, by the same measure, having stayed at about the same percentage of GDP for 30 years or so, has skyrocketed under Obama.

(Click on the image for the accompanying article.)

Defense spending, a constitutional role of government, is really not the problem when it comes to our national debt.  Just an FYI.

Democrats carped over the big spending of the Bush administration.  (True conservatives did, too, by the way.)  But when they got the reins, both the White House and Congress, Democrats made Republican spending look positively thrifty.

When they have lots of money, Democrats spend money on all sorts of government programs.  And when we have less money, as in this recession, Democrats spend money on all sorts of government programs.

Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the House majority whip, said that trying to find greater savings in the budget, which was released by President Barack Obama this morning, wouldn’t help alleviate the recession.
“We’ve got to make some decisions here as to what’s in the best interests of our country going forward,” Clyburn said during an appearance on Fox News. “And I think the best interest is to invest in education, control these deficits, while at the same time trying to get people back to work.”

“We’re not going to save our way out of this recession,” the majority whip added. “We’ve got to spend our way out of this recession, and I think most economists know that.”

But Chuck Bentley, CEO of Crown Financial Ministries, has a different take on the issue.

The government is almost insolvent already because it borrows more money than it takes in. The government is trying to spend its way out of economic trouble.

Washington is not spending cash reserves, its spending borrowed money. We’re borrowing money to solve a problem caused by borrowing too much money. We’re borrowing from foreign sources. Spending is out of control. The only way to fund it is to raise taxes, borrow, or print money. None of those strategies will lead to economic health.

The Democrats are looking at the ends and forgetting all about the means they’re using to achieve them.  Indeed, Obama’s new budget spends a record $3.8 trillion dollars.

The spending blueprint for next year calls for tax cuts for workers and business and more aid for cash-starved state governments as well as the unemployed. The jobs initiative largely mirrors last year’s stimulus bill, but is about one-third its size. The president is asking for nearly $300 billion for recession relief and job stimulus.

The budget paints a remarkably dire picture of a federal government that will have to borrow one-third of what it spends next year as it runs a deficit that still would total some $1.3 trillion.

This from the guy who says he’s trying to reduce deficits.
Please read all of Chuck Bentley’s article.  He goes over his 5 predicted trends for 2009 (which were all very much on the money, so to speak), and he goes over his 5 trend predictions for 2010.  It’s very likely we’re not out of the woods yet, and government isn’t really helping.

Chuck’s advice to Americans, and America’s government, is the same; get your financial house in order first.  Maxing out your credit cards when you’re already deeply in debt, on the assumption that things are going to get better, is a risky bet.  Just ask banks that bought those (now) toxic home mortgage securities.  Here’s his #5 trend prediction:

The mid-term elections will be a pivotal moment for the economic direction of our country. I don’t want to get into politics, but the problem is the U.S. is increasing its debt while people are trying to get out of debt. There are big differences in what people see as the solution. The population is trying to get its house in order while the government tries to spend its way out of trouble. The U.S. dollar has lost value because of government’s fiscal irresponsibility. The government can only get money by taxing, borrowing, and printing money. More programs mean more money is needed to fund them. That means government will print more money and further devalue the dollar. You can’t become prosperous through government spending. Elected officials from both parties treat the dollar as if it were Monopoly money. When taxing and borrowing isn’t bringing in enough money, government will print it. That will lower the value of the dollar, and devalue your savings. Our elected leaders are living foolishly. We should vote for those seeking office who pledge to be good stewards of the money the people supply the government through taxes. They should act as trustees that are committed to protect the people by making sure the government lives within its means. Work with all your power to get the government to live within its means. The mid-term elections will indicate the direction of the country. If we’re not successful in electing good stewards, a very painful correction is coming.

If that correction comes, be sure government will misread the reasons.  Just get educated yourself.

That’s what writer Keith Baldrey is asking.

Is health care becoming the mortal enemy of our country’s education system?

I don’t pose this question facetiously. When we’re discussing public services, it’s important to remember that at the end of the day, everything comes down to money.

And it is obvious that health care is increasingly getting that money at the apparent expense of other public services – most notably education.

In fact, our health-care system’s voracious and unending appetite for tax dollars is crowding out spending in all sorts of other areas.

That’s a fair question.  We don’t yet have a system like Canada’s, for example, but we do have tax dollars that do go into heath care.  But is it really that bad?  Is there really that much of an issue of having to decide either health care or education?

We no, not really.  As James Taranto notes:

If only we had a single-payer system like Canada’s . . . Oh, wait! Baldrey’s article is about Canada’s system. It appears in the Surrey (British Columbia) Now.

And be thankful that it won’t be.

From James Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today” column, a must-read column:

How did Barack Obama manage to kick off his presidency by making exactly the same disastrous mistake Bill Clinton made 16 years earlier? One answer is that Obama thought Clinton’s health-care errors were tactical rather than strategic, and that correcting these–by letting Congress write the bill, or by cutting deals with industry groups in exchange for their support–would be sufficient to ensure success.

But if Rep. Marion Berry is right, the answer may be as simple as sheer hubris. Berry, an Arkansas Democrat first elected in 1996, announced over the weekend that he won’t seek re-election. In an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, reprinted by Politico, Berry, who was an “aye” in the House’s 220-215 vote for ObamaCare Nov. 7, recounts his unsuccessful efforts to persuade the White House to pursue more moderate policies:

Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.

“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”

“You’ve got me.” In fairness, one can see why Obama might have been overly impressed with himself. Here’s a guy who became president of the United States just four years out of the Illinois Senate, and along the way developed a cultlike following. It sounds as though Obama became a follower as well as figurehead of his own cult of personality. He overestimated the degree to which he was special as opposed to lucky–a very human failing.

Indeed, he’s only human.  His followers, however, bought into the image hook, line, sinker and fishing pole.  It was willful blindness, as they couched their ignorance in the heady thought of electing the first African-American President.  It was all about feeling good about what you were doing, rather than about policies and programs and party planks.  And now the Democrats are paying the price for promoting it.

As it turns out, Berry understated the peril in which Obama was placing Democrats–not just in a conservative area like the First District of Arkansas (where John McCain topped Obama, 59% to 38%), but even in Massachusetts (Obama 62%, McCain 36%), where last week the Democrats could not hold Ted Kennedy’s former Senate seat. Even observers who have thought for some time that ObamaCare was bad news for Democrats were surprised that it was this bad.

Welcome to the real world, where even liberals are getting the idea that government is doing too much to try to “fix” things, many of which aren’t broken, and many of which the private sector can handle.  (Yes, those are poll results from last September, and they can certainly change, but the trend lines are really veering away from the “big government” mindset.)

Believing your own press is the worst thing that can afflict a politician, and Obama seems to have soaked it up.  This is why a liberal media can, indeed, sometimes hurt a Democrat; they butter him up with good press, and don’t reflect what the people think.  (It another proof that indeed the media lean liberal, causing this to happen.)  Then a Republican replaces Ted Kennedy and they’re shocked.

Good morning Democrats.  This your wake-up call.

From Michael Ramirez (click for a larger version):

Oh look, a squirrel….

Presented here with no other commentary than a hearty, “Amen!”  James Taranto:

“The majority is deeply wrong on the law,” according to a critic of yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC . “Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money.”

Whose opinion is this? We don’t know exactly, because it is not attributed to any individual. It is an unsigned editorial in the New York Times. That is to say, it reflects the collective opinion of the Times editorial board, a division of the New York Times Co., a corporation that exists to make money.

It’s lucky for the New York Times Co. that the Supreme Court upheld its First Amendment rights. Otherwise, it could not have exercised its First Amendment right to denounce the court for upholding its First Amendment rights. Right?

Not quite. As Justice Anthony Kennedy noted in his opinion, the McCain-Feingold “campaign finance” law–which until yesterday’s ruling made it a felony for corporations to engage in certain political speech–exempted “media companies” like the New York Times Co. (and News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and this Web site) from this restriction.

McCain-Feingold, in other words, granted a small group of companies, including the New York Times Co., the privilege to speak freely about politics, while denying it to all other corporations–not only “companies . . . that exist to make money,” but also taxable nonprofits that exist to represent a point of view, including the advocacy arms of the Sierra Club, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association.

The editorial published by the New York Times Co. includes no mention of the special privilege the New York Times Co. enjoyed under McCain-Feingold–a privilege that creates at least the appearance of a journalistic conflict of interest. Is not the failure to disclose the New York Times Co.’s interest in McCain-Feingold a serious violation of journalistic ethics?

The Times’s opinion is wrongheaded as well. Under the paper’s cramped view of the First Amendment, the privilege the New York Times Co. enjoyed under McCain-Feingold was just that: a privilege, not a right. The First Amendment does not say “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech of media corporations.” If the Constitution doesn’t protect corporations, it doesn’t protect the New York Times Co. And if Congress had the power to grant an exemption to media companies, it also had the power to take it away.As Justice Clarence Thomas noted in McConnell v. FEC (2003), such reasoning would permit “outright regulation of the press.” Some on the far left, complaining about “corporate domination” of the media, would like to see just that.

In past generations, the New York Times Co. had a proud tradition as a defender of free expression. It was the prevailing litigant in two landmark Supreme Court cases expanding and vindicating First Amendment rights, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) and New York Times Co. v. U.S. (1971). The former case, by the way, involved a political advertisement.

What a shame it is to see a once-great media corporation become a fair-weather friend of free expression.

Unless you’ve been living in a closet for 2 week, or are a die-hard Obama supporter trying to avoid the news, Scott Brown, the Republican, won the special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy.

Yes, that Ted Kennedy.

Was this simply a local election, judged solely on local issues?  I don’t think so, especially since Brown himself injected national issues into it when he said he would vote against health care "reform".  Yes, local issues played a part, but I think the national ones overshadowed them. 

This is Massachusetts, after all, one of the bluest of blue states, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 3.5 to 1, and where they were replacing a Democrat who’d held that seat for a generation. 

Polls a month ago put Coakley ahead by 20 points.  Brown then made it national, and all of a sudden the momentum shifted in a big way.  The payoffs, most notably to Senator Ben Nelson, didn’t help matters.

There are those that say conservatives shouldn’t get credit for Coakley’s defeat, and explain why the loss was mostly, if not wholly, due to disappointment by Democrats in Obama; what he promised vs. what he’s delivered.  The problem with that analysis is that not much on that front has changed in 3-4 weeks, when Coakley’s numbers tanked.  The issues noted in that blog post — military commissions, international surveillance, drug laws, sentencing reform, Gitmo’s closing, the Afghanistan war, anti-terror policies — have not substantially changed one bit since mid-December.  So you can’t really say that those are the issues that moved the voters.  A sea changed occurred, and there’s one thing, one major issue, that did change during that time; the health care "reform" bill. 

According to Rasmussen, 56% of voters thought that this was the most important issue.  Brown brought up the issue of voting against it, and once he did, voters flocked to his side.  Now true, some did so because they don’t like it at all, and some did so because they thought it didn’t go far enough.  Rasmussen notes:

Forty-seven percent (47%) favor the health care legislation before Congress while 51% oppose it. However, the intensity was clearly with those who are opposed. Just 25% of voters in Massachusetts Strongly Favor the plan while 41% Strongly Oppose it.

Fifty percent (50%) say it would be better to pass no health care legislation at all rather than passing the bill before Congress.

But the point here is this is Massachusetts, after all, where Democrats far outnumber Republicans and where Ted Kennedy was in a safe Senate seat for a generation.  And they’ve elected a man who says he’ll vote against the health care "reform" bill.  Conservatives, mostly of the Tea Party variety, have been getting the word out on how awful this bill will be, and while the opinion polls have gone against it, now, more importantly, the voters have as well, pulling off what’s been called an epic upset. 

Will Democrats in Washington get the message?  We’ll see.

Dan Perrin at RedState laments the very real possibility that Harry Reid has his 60 votes for health care "reform".

Word is rampant among the Senate leadership, as well as is being reported by the Wall Street Journal, that Senator Reid has got to 60 votes on cloture on the Senate ObamaCare bill.

The question of whether we live in a country ruled by leaders who refuse to listen, but do what they believe is in their own interest, has been answered.

Conservatives hate this bill. Progressives and liberals hate it too. The public is solidly against it.

But it does not matter, apparently. The implications of a country in open revolt against this bill and the elite in the Democratic party giving the public the finger are profound.

The Daily Kos and FireDogLakes of the net could not produce a single Democratic Senator or Independent to vote no. Conservatives could not produce a single Democratic Senate vote against cloture. Neither could the general public. Perhaps the left can still get one of their own to kill this nightmare. Is there not a single Dem Senator who will stand with the public, or is this merely a quaint notion we used to have about our country — that the system responds to the public?

And they have 60 votes for a bill that hasn’t even been CBO-scored yet.  The vote hasn’t come yet, so there’s still time for some reasonable Democrats to become unable to stomach the massive price tag for this.  In the meantime…

The world will understand America has changed. Our country is now run by elites who are printing money, debasing our currency to throw at massive new spending and deficit creating programs — and actually believe they are both moral and politically smart. Just 19% of the public believes this plan will not increase the deficit.

What comes next is very discomforting to think about. But we have now crossed that line from what our country was into something else, and that something else has nothing whatsoever with the country being a Republic. There will be a reckoning for this, and it will not be pleasant — not for anyone.

(Emphasis in original.)  We’ve lost a lot of ground in the slippery slope of elitist rule.

People generally quote the non-partisan CBO score when trying to figure out how much a bill will cost us.  But Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute notes that, since the CBO is quite transparent, showing how it calculates its scores, Congressional Democrats are gaming the system to make the Senate bill look far cheaper than it really would be.

For some time, I’ve suspected the answer is that congressional Democrats have very carefully tailored their individual and employer mandates to avoid CBO’s definition of what shall be counted in the federal budget. Democrats are still smarting over the CBO’s decision in 1994.  By revealing the full cost of the Clinton plan, the CBO helped to kill the bill.

Since then, keeping the cost of their private-sector mandates out of the federal budget has been Job One for Democratic health wonks.  While head of the CBO, Obama’s budget director Peter Orszag altered the CBO’s orientation to make it more open and collaborative.  One of the things about which the CBO has been more open is the criteria it uses to determine whether to include mandated private-sector spending in the federal budget.  The CBO even published a paper on the topic.  Read this profile of Orszag by Ezra Klein, and you’ll see that those criteria were also a likely area of collaboration with lawmakers.

The Medical Loss Ratios memo is the smoking gun.  It shows that indeed, Democrats have been submitting proposals to the CBO behind closed doors and tailoring their private-sector mandates to avoid having those costs appear in the federal budget.  Proposals that would result in a complete cost estimate — such as the proposal by Sen. Rockefeller discussed in the Medical Loss Ratios memo — are dropped.  Because we can’t let the public see how much this thing really costs.

Crafting the private-sector mandates such that they fall just a hair short of CBO’s criteria for inclusion in the federal budget does not reduce their cost, nor does it make those mandates any less binding.  But it dramatically reduces the apparent cost of the legislation.  It is the reason we’re all talking about an $848 billion Reid bill, rather than a $2.1 trillion Reid bill.

All the promises of reducing the total deficit or paying for the bill with Medicare cuts are as much smoke and mirrors (and outright lies) if the base cost of the bill is fudged.  You’re being led down the primrose path by folks who know full well you wouldn’t support it if you knew how much it was really going to cost.

That’s what the German’s pay, and yet their system has long ago run out of money.

Germany’s system relies on a handful of state-supported health insurers. This week they informed the government that the system was on the brink of a financial shortfall equal to nearly $11 billion.

Pointedly, the insurers made clear that cutbacks alone won’t solve the problem. They said the government would have to consider raising premiums on the insured or, you guessed it, raise taxes. Currently, German workers pay a fixed-rate premium into the insurance scheme; that rate is now set at 14.9% of gross pay.

Chancellor Merkel, something of a political acrobat, was previously allied in coalition with leftist Social Democrats. She’s now resisting calls from the Free Democrats to get off the state-pulled health-care train. The FDP’s spokesman on health, Daniel Bahr, wants a "shift in direction away from state-run medicine." Why? Because "the current financial figures have showed us that the health-care fund doesn’t work."

"Doesn’t work."  Please someone inform the Senate Democrats of this.