Half a million bucks for Ohio trip to tout ‘Recovery Summer’
Saturday, June 19, 2010 at 11:03AM by Kay B. Day
Our federal government just doesn’t get what the least-educated person on Main Street gets. If you’re deep in debt, you don’t keep spending. But President Barack Obama, perhaps to deflect attention from the federal botching of the Gulf Oil Spill disaster, spent large sums of money for a purely political event. How much did it cost?
CBS News said: “The trip Columbus [sic] probably cost taxpayers between $500,000 and $1 million…Air Force One alone bills out at $100,000 per hour, and the round trip is nearly two hours. Adding to the cost are military aircraft to carry limos and secret service vehicles, Marine One on standby, Secret Service, local police and other factors.”
Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden are pushing the idea of ‘Recovery Summer.’ This attempt to establish political fact and promote big government suggests our leaders suffer from delusional thinking and they need to recover before the US is mired in debt for generations to come.
Voters should embrace the idea of ‘Recovery Fall,’ when the country has an opportunity to reduce the Democrat chokehold on power in Washington, a chokehold that began to form nearly 4 years ago when Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) promised a more ethical Congress. In the years that followed, the chair of the committee responsible for tax regulations found himself in trouble over his own taxes as did the Treasury Secretary.
In those same years another Dem congressman was convicted of bribery and racketeering—how long did Pelosi give him a pass?
Party members in Congress have also publicly admitted signing controversial laws they had not read and could not even explain accurately. Besides all that a number of presidential appointees have suspect ideologies. The list of failures could fill a big fat book.
Democrats have also further indebted taxpayers for the future by ramping up government employee rosters—to 1.43 million in 2010.
There is an obvious inability to govern. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said in the weekly Republican address on Saturday: “[t]he administration’s moratorium on deepwater drilling has the potential to become the third wave of this disaster. If left in place, the moratorium will permanently eliminate thousands of jobs and drive up the cost of energy for all Americans. You don’t have to take my word for it. Earlier this week democratic strategist James Carville said the moratorium was ‘wrecking the economy’ of the Gulf Coast.”
The result of Democrats’ absolute control of all branches of the federal government—I include judicial here because of rampant legislation from the bench—is tough times for Main Street as the Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate spends money like a rock star with a one-hit record.
One serious problem with federal spending is the emphasis among agencies on spending all the budgeted money before the fiscal year ends. Traditionally in federal and state government, the policy dictates that if an agency doesn’t spend money, the money will be returned to the general revenue pool—a perfect motive for excessive spending.
If our president wants to promote Democrat policy, the money should come from Democrat Party coffers.
And he should really think about the words ‘Recovery Summer.’
Because a real recovery will be possible only in the fall when voters have a chance to restore some sort of balance in Washington by giving big spenders the boot and electing fiscal conservatives.
Join me in ‘Recovery Fall’ and kick ‘Tax and Spendthrift’ politicos out of office.