Yes…I’m aware that GOP.com could very possibly be a biased source, but that still doesn’t keep me from being amused by Barack Obama’s Spend-o-Meter. The graphic’s a little difficult to read here, so click the previous link to see the original.  That’s $874.35 Billion (as in BILLION) of our money.  I don’t think repealing tax cuts and closing corporate tax loopholes will be enough revenue to cover the checks we will be writing to fund all these proposals.

Isn’t it always the Dems who say that Republicans must tell us how they are going to pay for any proposed new spending? Somehow they never seem to apply the same high standards to their own candidates than they do to candidates on the Republican side. Funny how that works. The GOP’s helpful list also illustrates that Barack is not much different from any Washington insider by the way he writes checks with OUR checkbooks. This is something all Washington politicians do, although John McCain is not quite as proficient as it as his Dem opponents. We can’t trust John McCain on many issues, but holding the line on spending has never been a problem for him.

I am also amused that the stock answer to the question of how all this new spending will be paid for is always to repeal the Bush tax cuts, and to punish corporations for making more money than the Dems think they should. There are quite a few dumb people out there who smile and nod, and say that this makes total sense. Increasing federal spending to the levels Barack and Hillary want would be incredibly reckless, because the government spends too much of our money already — and we still haven’t made a serious commitment to reforming entitlements. If no politician can make a genuine commitment to reducing the massive bureaucracy we have now, the least we could do is try to improve the programs we have without adding new ones. This is common sense. Unfortunately, that’s not the way Washington operates. I’m not sure that any presidential candidate has the ability to fix the status quo.

It would be nice to have a president who can do all the things Barack Obama is promising — and it’s easy to get sucked into the hopeful changemonger rhetoric and his promises of unity for the country — but is it too much to ask that a future president do more than give great speeches and to help Congress spend our money? The saving grace in all of Obama’s new spending proposals is that there is no way he will get all of that spending through Congress.

Promising everything to everyone. The Dems have done this for years. Barack Obama is no different from the rest of the party when it comes to extending the reach of the federal government through spending. Those who expect Barack to make a clean break from the Democrat party line will be sorely disappointed with President Obama.