Obama's HOPE Is That He Gets All of Your CHANGE

The President's new 2011 budget may have slashed money for NASA, but this administration is still on the verge of a new frontier in federal debt. His $3,800,000,000,000.00 proposal is the largest in U.S. history and--without significant changes--would add $8.5 trillion in American I.O.U.s by 2020. Of that, $1.3 trillion would be "new borrowing." For all of his talk about tightening America's belt, this President is adding more elastic! A "domestic spending freeze" makes for good television, but in the end, that's all it is: political theater.

To offset the spending, the White House promised across-the-board cuts. Unfortunately for taxpayers, they only amount to $20 billion in savings--which barely cracks 1% of the total bill. Instead, the President plans to raise the money by slashing tax cuts for families, including the child tax credit (conceived by FRC) and the death tax. Although the average American will be swimming in red ink, the President's budget still includes billions more in education initiatives, Title X funding (which subsidizes groups that perform abortions), D.C. abortions, and the United Nation's Population Fund (which has been tied to coercive abortion). Using the President's own numbers, taxes would increase by $2 trillion under this budget in 10 years.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), a key player on the House Budget Committee, is gearing up for a congressional showdown. "Regrettably, the budget the administration... submitted to Congress is... a very aggressive agenda of more government spending, more taxes, more deficits, and more debt- with just [enough] cosmetic maneuvers to give the illusion of restraint." According to the Wall Street Journal, the entire package would push the debt as a percentage of the GDP to 77% from 53%.

And that doesn't begin to cover the second stimulus bill, which President Obama has threatened to ram through Congress this spring. The cost for Stimulus II? A cool $100 billion. Not surprisingly, the leadership is warning the Democrats not to call it a "stimulus bill"--a strategy that was lost on Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who spilled the beans on a "telephone townhall." "...[W]e're told not to call it another stimulus bill. We're calling it a jobs bill." Of course, the $787 billion "stimulus" bill was supposed to be about jobs too. Even if the plan did save or create 2.5 million jobs, as the White House claims, it still adds up to a whopping $315,000 per job. As FRC warned last spring, not every job was worth saving. Last Friday, a conservative blogger broke the story that the President's first recovery package hid a $387,000 grant for Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts. Democrats can call it a jobs bill or a stimulus package--but in the end, it's nothing more than a Left-wing bailout with taxpayer money.

Today's Health Care Takeover Brought to You by...

The President has indicated he doesn't want to debate health care now, the Democrats lost a Senate seat in Massachusetts over it, and a solid majority of Americans oppose the plan. So why is the liberal leadership plowing ahead on this kamikaze path? For that, we need only to look at the special interest groups pushing them in that direction, as well as those who funnel millions of dollars to Democratic candidates. Health Care for America Now (HCAN) is the granddaddy of them all. With a $40 million budget, HCAN is a coalition of unions, pro-homosexual and pro-abortion groups that are housed in the heart of high dollar lobbyists at 1825 K St, NW in Washington, D.C. for the sole purpose of getting ObamaCare passed.

Many of the organizations in HCAN, including Planned Parenthood, AFL-CIO, and the YWCA, receive millions in taxpayer dollars to subsidize their lobbying. Others in the coalition, such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), were also behind the thuggish attacks on the Tea Party movement and people opposing health care on the local level. Many more filled the seats at various stages of the "health care" townhall meetings that starred President Obama. Another recurrent theme of several of the groups that comprise HCAN is that they've received money from liberal billionaire George Soros and his friends. With so much invested, is it any wonder HCAN doesn't want the health care overhaul bills to go away?

Victory at Waterloo

Several governors decided to turn down federal abstinence funding just as new research is demonstrating how effective the message is. Today, Dr. Geoffrey Fong from the University of Waterloo and Drs. John and Loretta Jemmott from the University of Pennsylvania released a groundbreaking study on the impact of abstinence-only programs on African America students over a two-year period. While 48.5% of the sixth and seventh graders in the control group were sexually active during the 24 month period, only 33% of those who participated in the abstinence education course were sexually active in this same time period. As the authors concluded, "[T]he results of this... trial are promising. They suggest that the theory-based abstinence-only interventions can have positive effects on adolescents' sexual involvement." In light of this research, the administration should reconsider its strategy of slashing abstinence funding in favor sex-ed curriculum that does little more than encourage high-risk behavior.