Which part of “No more deficit spending” don’t the professional politicians in Washington understand? As Examiner columnist Michelle Malkin points out on page 36, within minutes of signing the bipartisan debt-ceiling deal worked out by congressional leaders, President Obama stood in the White House Rose Garden demanding new “key investments” — i.e. spending more money the federal government doesn’t have and will have to borrow from China or somebody else. This time, it’s for an “infrastructure bank” championed by 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. The Massachusetts senator assures America that his proposal will create jobs in the construction industry by making tax-funded loans to finance new projects.
Of course, we’ve already been down this road before with Obama’s spectacularly failed $859 billion economic stimulus program, approximately one-fourth of which funded all those “shovel-ready infrastructure projects.” Two years later, with unemployment still above 9 percent, business and consumer confidence at historic lows, and the economy nosing over into the second dip of a double-dip recession, Obama chuckled as he recently conceded that those “shovel-ready projects weren’t as shovel-ready as we thought.”
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But previous failures of government programs never stop Big Government obsessives like Obama and Kerry from slapping catchy new titles on the same old failed ideas and promising, as Obama did in the Rose Garden, that, trust us, this time, we promise, it really will “put construction workers to work right now.” Professional Washington politicians like Obama and Kerry would have us believe that the outcome will be different this time because, instead of wasting billions of tax dollars by letting Department of Transportation bureaucrats hand them out, we’ll just create another government-funded “bank” to write the checks. Examiner columnist Timothy Carney calls it “Fannie Pave.”
The latest national survey by Rasmussen Reports suggests that Obama and Kerry vastly underestimate the intelligence of the American people. According to Rasmussen, only 22 percent of more than 1,000 likely voters surveyed Aug. 1-2 approve of the debt-ceiling deal, while 53 percent disapprove. It’s no surprise that three-fourths of conservative voters reject the deal, but so do more than half of the moderates. Even among Democrats, more voters (40 percent) reject the deal than approve (34 percent). Why the skepticism? “One reason for the disapproval may be that most voters (58 percent) say it’s unlikely the deal will lead to a significant decrease in federal spending over the next few years. Only 35 percent consider such spending cuts even somewhat likely,” Rasmussen said.
Put another way, most people outside of Washington no longer believe the professional politicians in this town. So when Obama hails a debt-ceiling deal, then within minutes proposes new spending that will drive the debt higher, he’s confirming how out of touch he is with most Americans. No wonder the latest Gallup Poll shows him with a 48 percent disapproval rating.
