The Down Payment On Restoring Budget Sanity: A Victory For The American People

Last night’s last-minute agreement on significant spending reductions for the balance of the 2011 fiscal year, which averted a government shut-down, was an historic accomplishment for the American people concerned about our nation’s current path towards bankruptcy.

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President Obama‘s cheerleaders at MSNBC have tried to give him credit for making the deal possible. ‘Tingle-down-my-leg’ Chris Matthews, for example, said last night that Obama was

the adult in the room

Nice try, but after a couple of failed meetings at the White House, Obama took a time out, while the real work was going on elsewhere. Obama was relegated to a bystander status during yesterday’s feverish negotiations between the Republican House leadership and the Senate Democratic leadership. And he looked like a deer caught in the headlights when he appeared on TV late last night to announce the deal. He began by mentioning how the Washington Monument, lit up behind him, would now be kept open. Somewhere down on his list of those whom he said would benefit from the deal were our soldiers, who will now be sure they will continue to receive their paychecks. Obama is clueless on what the American people, through the Tea Party movement and other grass-roots movements, have managed to accomplish. What Obama does not want to admit is that the spending-cut agreement, while short of the full $61 billion in savings the House of Representatives had originally passed, begins at long last to seriously reverse the stimulus spending binge trajectory that began on his watch. It is the down payment on trillions of dollars more in spending cuts to come, which are necessary to restore our nation’s fiscal health. The Tea Party WDC has provided a detailed summary of the budget deal agreement, which I have excerpted below. It reveals some additional items that have not gotten much publicity at all, such as required audits of Obamacare waivers to unions and other special interest groups and audits of the so-called Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: More...