Can You Spend Your Way to Prosperity?

If you are a prudent conscientious citizen, you try to live within your means so that you don't get into financial trouble and all the extra problems that come with that happening. So if individuals try to be frugal and fiscally conservative, why can't the government do the same?

One answer might be is that the bureaucrats in the government, who allocate and spend our tax money, are not spending their own money, so who cares? People are most always more capable of being careful to get the “most bang for their buck” when it is their money and not someone else's money.

The Obama administration realizes that Obama cannot be re-elected by pointing out the successes of his administration, so he will have to generate votes some other way which might include getting as many people on the “dole” as possible so that they might, in turn, cast their vote for Obama and the Democrats to keep their government “freebies” coming in. Today, one in five Americans - 67 million of us, all told - rely on federal aid in obtaining housing, food, income, health care, and education. Dependency-related programs now cost $2.5 trillion annually which comes to roughly 70% of the federal budget. It has exploded over the past three years of the Obama administration, in which Obama has consciously decided to make government bigger and more people dependent on it. It is a subtle form of “bribery”.

Obama has done this by expanding pre-existing entitlement programs. We have expanded Medicare to cover prescription drugs (which was passed during the Bush administration), not just physician and hospital expenses. Medicaid, which was intended to provide health care for the poor, is now expanded to cover middle-class and even more affluent children. Disability insurance expands to cover more and more conditions, including even “classroom stress” for teachers. The expansion of these programs were not made because of the downturn of the business cycle, these decisions were made with a political consideration in mind, and it has accelerated during bad economic times which makes dependency grow even faster.

You can see that wherever Obama goes on the “stump”, he panders to his audience by tossing out “goodies” for the naïve flock of listeners. In fact, people think he is the “Messiah” passing out the largesse from his own stash of cash, without realizing that it is the taxpayers who are really footing the bill, not Obama.

Be prepared to hear Obama promise to open up his government “candy store” to attract voters in hopes that they will want to keep their “gifts” from the U.S. Treasury and to keep their “angel” in the White House, so the cash spigot remains open for at least four more years.

So the answer is NO. We can't spend our way to prosperity, but we can spend our way into poverty by becoming another Greece, Spain or Italy.

Vote NOBAMA IN 2012.

Conservative commentary by Chuck Lehmann