Admitting now that he has come to the reality that fiscal responsibility is needed to help ease the economic crisis, President Obama has signed new legislation that would make Congress pay as they go.
Obama, quoted in Politico, said the following about the new spending policies of this Congress:
“Now, Congress will have to pay for what it spends, just like everybody else,” Obama said in his radio and Internet address released Saturday morning. “After a decade of profligacy, the American people are tired of politicians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk when it comes to fiscal responsibility. It’s easy to get up in front of the cameras and rant against exploding deficits. What’s hard is actually getting deficits under control. But that’s what we must do.”
Mr. Obama still does not get it. Pay close attention to what he says. He suggests that Congress will have to pay for everything now just as everyone else does. Has Mr. Obama forgotten that it is everybody else that funds the projects that Congress allocates money towards? Apparently so.
Pay as you go legislation will probably effect very little change on a Congress that knows no bounds when it comes to spending money that it does not yet have. This legislation will merely be a propaganda item for Mr. Obama to use in the 2010 election cycle to boost his fiscal responsibility bona fides at a time when it is popular amongst the electorate. A Congress that learns that it needs to be fiscally responsible only after losing at the polls is not a responsible congress, regardless of what legislation they pass to govern themselves. Members of Congress had stacks of data that they chose to ignore before we got to this point.
