For wont of $3 billion: the President's Priorities

"I have moved quickly to work with my economic team and leaders of both parties on an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan that will immediately jump- start job creation and long-term growth ...this plan must begin today, a plan I am confident will save or create at least 3 million jobs over the next few years." --President-Elect Barack Obama, January 8, 2009

With another "jobs speech" scheduled for Thursday, it is worth remembering the speech President-Elect Barack Obama gave at George Mason University the second week of 2009. Obama asserted that only government -- through a massive, $840 billion stimulus package -- could jump-start the stricken economy.



In his 2009 speech, Obama promised to "put people to work repairing crumbling roads, bridges and schools by eliminating the backlog of well-planned, worthy and needed infrastructure projects", i.e., the infamous, "shovel-ready" construction projects that he later confessed didn't really exist.



In fact, only six (6) percent of Stimulus spending went to construction projects; much of the rest redistributed wealth from the private sector to public sector unions.

For wont of $3 billion, NASA loses manned space flight capability...

In the midst of the Stimulus spending spree, President Obama shocked the NASA program with a devastating pronouncement. The Space Shuttle replacement effort, dubbed the Constellation Program, which needed $3 billion in annual funding, would be terminated.



For the first time since the initial manned flight of Project Mercury on April 18, 1961, the United States would not have the ability to put a man into space. In spite of the national security impact of the space program -- and the fact that China has actively tested anti-satellite weaponry, the President felt that $3 billion was too much to spend on a replacement for the Space Shuttle.

...though illegal aliens received $4.2 billion in tax credits

And it wasn't just the fact that the public sector unions were awash with hundreds of billions in taxpayer Stimulus cash: the waste, fraud, and abuse in other federal programs turned out to be equally outrageous.



• The IRS sent $4.2 billion in tax credits to illegal aliens

• The EPA received an increase of $2.7 billion in funding from 2010 to 2011

• Spending on the Food Stamp program has more than doubled since 2009, to $71 billion in 2011

Priorities

The President's priorities are funding his union boss supporters, growing the size of government bureaucracies, ringing up massive deficits, advancing the anti-jobs "green" agenda, and cutting back on strategic national security programs.



Now I want you to imagine what Obama's priorities will be if he were to be reelected in 2012. He would have absolutely nothing to lose in enacting an even more radical agenda: his devastating policies will go from merely stunningly bad to spectacularly worse.



And that is why he must be defeated next November.