Obama’s big government gamble

In his speech on the economy delivered at Georgetown University on Tuesday, he lectured the audience about the need to get serious about addressing entitlement reform. But even the Washington Post was skeptical.

“Many of the savings identified in the president’s budget are phony, and the real ones are used to offset the costs of his new spending increases or tax cuts,” the Post editorialized. The newspaper also noted that “the health-care savings he has identified are all directed to new health-care spending, and, even then, they cover only a fraction of the likely costs of a health-care bill — of what would become yet another entitlement program.”

In fact, the cost of implementing the type of health-care plan that Obama proposed during his campaign has been estimated at roughly $1.5 trillion over ten years. The only way Obama would be able to seriously reduce costs of medical care under a government-controlled system would be to ration care to the sick and slash reimbursement rates for doctors, which will trigger longer waiting times for patients. While Europeans may be used to this, it is harder to imagine Americans standing for it.

All told, Obama’s agenda is projected to more than double the public debt to $17.3 trillion by 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office, equal to a staggering 82.4 percent of the economy.

Obama will be hard-pressed to pay off that debt without either massive, broad-based tax increases, or printing enough money to pay of the debt, which would trigger massive inflation.

Dr. Krauthammer calls The New Foundation The Sting, In Four Parts

As it happens, Obama is not the first to try this slogan. President Jimmy Carter peppered his 1979 State of the Union address with five “New Foundations” (and eight more just naked “foundations”). Like most of Carter’s endeavors, this one failed, perhaps because (as I recall it being said at the time) it sounded like the introduction of a new kind of undergarment.

Undaunted, Obama offered his New Foundation speech as the complete, contextual, canonical text for the domestic revolution he aims to enact. It had everything we have come to expect from Obama

Augean Stables looks at Ivy League madness:
Harvard’s Muslim Chaplain Notes the Wisdom of Killing Apostates and The Email of Taha Abdul-Basser, Harvard’s Muslim Chaplain, on the question of death for Apostasy in Islam

Shilling for the Democrat Party can be stressful apparently

From Maria, The Left Is Making A Mistake In Ridiculing The Tea Parties, while Evil Right Wing Extremists Who Would Destroy America Gather in Denver

And last but not least, Palin Says She Considered Abortion

The governor’s 30-minute speech was folksy and full of digressions, but also surprisingly confessional, and she went into some detail about initially panicking after learning, 13 weeks into her pregnancy, that her son would be born with Down syndrome: “That blew me away, it rocked my world… It was a time I asked myself, was I going to walk the walk?”

She was on a trip out of state at the time, she said, and “just for a fleeting moment I thought, ‘No one knows me here; no one would ever know.’ … My amniocentesis came back and then I understood why some people would think they could change their circumstances, just take care of it. Todd didn’t even know” the results of the prenatal testing yet, so “no one would know.”

“Plus, I was old,” she continued. “And I thought, ‘Very funny, God. My name’s Sarah, but my husband’s not Abraham, he’s Todd.'” At 44, she said, she had a hard time imagining changing diapers again, not to mention “putting down the BlackBerry and picking up the breast pump.”

Though it was unclear from her remarks how seriously she considered terminating the pregnancy, she assured the audience that “we went through some things a year ago that’s helped me understand a woman and a girl’s temptation to make this go away.”

Another worry in what she called “my moments of doubt” was whether she could love the child enough. “Believe it or not, I didn’t even know what a baby with Down syndrome was going to look like or feel like.” She found the subject hard to research, she said, and “I had to ask that my heart be filled up” with feeling for her unborn son. That prayer was answered the minute he was born, she said.

“My heart overflowed. I felt a love I had never felt before. He’s brought amazing, surprising happiness; he’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

I admire her courage in doing the right thing, and in being so candid about her decision.