Obama: Give Me Money or the Cops and Teachers Get It!
Oh how I wish the Stimulating Finger of government would imitate the Moving Finger of Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát and move on. Alas, we are not nearly that fortunate.
President Obama urged reluctant lawmakers Saturday to quickly approve nearly $50 billion in emergency aid to state and local governments, saying the money is needed to avoid “massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters” and to support the still-fragile economic recovery.
In a letter to congressional leaders, Obama defended last year’s huge economic stimulus package, saying it helped break the economy’s free fall, but argued that more spending is urgent and unavoidable. “We must take these emergency measures,” he wrote in an appeal aimed primarily at members of his own party.
Here, I have questions.
1) We recently spent well over a trillion dollars very recently in an “emergency measure” to keep unemployment under eight percent. And when I say “we”, I mean all of us who pay taxes, and the next two generations of taxpayers after us, at least. How has all that worked out?
2) Are states and local government completely out of money that they need a billion dollars each? The President wants us to think that this money is absolutely necessary or we’ll see thousands upon thousands of fired first responders and teachers, but this makes no sense. If police, firefighters, and teachers are truly important, shouldn’t they be the last ones fired? Shouldn’t we see tens of thousands of mid-level bureaucrats hitting the unemployment lines before a single cop? Well, of course.
The President is using the same hoary hostage-taking ploy we see every year from our state and local governments. “Give us more money,” they say, “or the cops get it!”. That, folks, is a crock. The President is playing on your fears to get money he does not need and we can not afford to give him.
Here is the truth. Every single state and municipality has more than enough money to fund their schools, police stations, and fire departments. If they do not, it is because they are wasting money elsewhere. We need to refuse President Obama’s request and demand that our state and local governments cut everything else before they touch a single first responder’s or teacher’s job. If they can’t do that, then they are not competent to run our governments and we must fire them. It’s that simple.
Other Posts of Interest:
- “It is never a bad time for Republicans to speak economic truth…”
- Shocker: Obama Tells Another Tax Whopper
- Presidential Dishonesty and Other People’s Money, Today at AIP
Category: President Barack Obama, The Economy and Your Money
[...] That’s a righted ship right there. That’s stimulus success, the kind of success that requires another stimulus to make the success more successful!Yeah, that stimulus sure worked all right. Just look at that [...]