A New Era of Irresponsibility

From Thenewamerican.com

President Barack Obama has just recently released his $3.55 trillion fiscal 2010 budget, and already there's full employment among all the people who matter to officials in Washington, D.C. A front-page story for the March 2 Washington Post began: "President Obama's budget is so ambitious, with vast new spending on health care, energy independence, education and services for veterans, that experts say he probably will need to hire tens of thousands of new federal government workers to realize his goals."

The Post quoted officials of the Department of Veterans Affairs as saying they would hire some 17,000 new workers alone. A Heritage Foundation study estimates that nearly a quarter million new government workers will be needed to spend out the budget. But despite the prospects of full employment among government workers in the Washington, D.C., beltway, the rest of the country is in a bit rougher shape.

The GDP shrunk in the last quarter of 2008 at a 6.2 percent annualized rate, the worst in more than a generation. "Every major component of the economy shrank," the New York Times for February 28 noted, "except government spending." President Obama's $3.55 trillion budget proposal would at least protect that final growing node of the national "economy."