What We've Learned From Budget Debate

Barack Obama's runaway spending is the top issue with grass-roots Americans. The problem is a long way from solved, but we've learned a lot from the budget debate.

1. We've turned a corner. The debate is no longer about what new phony "stimulus" spending Obama will try to rush through Congress but about how much and what appropriations to cut.

2. The Democrats are better negotiators than Republicans. After the midnight Obama-John Boehner deal on the remainder of the 2011 budget, which was announced as a $38 billion reduction, we discovered that it was really only $20 billion, just a 1 percent reduction, because Obama had hidden in the agreement "phantom cuts," "orphan earmarks," credit for eliminating czars who were already toast, and generous funding for his favorite programs such as Head Start, "Race to the Top" and Pell grants.

3. U.S. voters are still vehement in demanding repeal of ObamaCare and the extra spending it includes. Support for Obama's signature legislation has dropped to only 35 percent.

4. The Democrats are obsequious servants of the feminists and intend to keep social issues on the front burner. President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were ready and willing to shut down the government in order to retain the appropriation for Planned Parenthood, the country's top abortion provider.

5. The feminist globalists dictate Obama's war policy, too. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, National Security Council Adviser Samantha Power and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice nagged Obama until he started a war with Moammar Qadhafi without knowing who the insurgents are and without any game plan to win anything helpful to the United States or even to Libya.

6. The Republicans have presented two sensible and specific budgets (Paul Ryan's and Jim Jordan's, speaking for the Republican Study Committee), while Obama's budget is a repeat of yesterday's spending orgy. That provides new proof that his real goal in being elected president was and is to "spread the wealth around" (as he told Joe the Plumber) to non-taxpayers, stealing from current taxpayers and inflicting colossal debt on their children and grandchildren.

7. It is really possible to balance the budget by 2020 and we must do it, as the Republican Study Committee's plan proves. If we delay that date, we will be spending every dollar of federal revenue on interest by 2025 which, like unpaid personal credit card debt, will progressively increase in rate in addition to amount.

8. The best rule of thumb in dealing with the 2012 federal budget deficit is to freeze total spending at the pre-Obama level. That's a reasonable goal.

9. Blindsided by their longtime patriotic support of our military, the Republicans failed to call for cutting off funds for the unconstitutional, undeclared, useless Obama war in Libya. Savings from waste in the defense budget should be spent on building the weapons we need to restore our military superiority.

10. The Republicans are hamstrung by their (usually correct) determination not to raise taxes. However, we should raise taxes on imports from countries that are massively cheating us every day by imposing a value-added tax equivalent to the tariff they pretended to reduce.

11. We can reform extravagant welfare spending and the more than 70 means-tested wealth-distribution handouts by the same formula the Republican Congress adopted in 1996. That welfare reform was signed by Bill Clinton but repealed by Obama.

12. We can stop the unsustainable growth of Medicaid by block-granting the funds to the states. The states can then fix eligibility and benefits.

13. The Republicans are far too timid in dealing with the fiscal and unemployment problems created by illegal immigration. That is costing us a mountain of taxpayer spending for means-tested financial handouts, hospital and medical care and U.S. citizenship given to anchor babies.

14. "Yes we can" (using a useful slogan from Obama's campaign) put Medicare and Social Security on sound financial footing that will enable those two programs to survive. Paul Ryan's and Jim Jordan's budgets both show us how.

15. Obama's profligate deficit spending confirms the researchers who discovered that Obama absorbed the Frances Fox Piven strategy, which he learned from her own lips as a principal speaker at a Socialist Party Scholars Conference in New York in 1983, when Obama was a student at Columbia University. The strategy is to flood the welfare system with more recipients than taxpayers can afford, thereby creating a financial and political crisis that will doom the capitalist system and move the U.S. into socialism.

That Socialist Party Conference commemorated the 100-year anniversary of Karl Marx's death, and Piven urged her listeners to "stand within the intellectual and political tradition Marx bequeathed." Scholar Stanley Kurtz has documented that event and identified the stealthy socialists who maintained a presence throughout the world of community organizing, many of whom were colleagues or mentors of Obama.

Phyllis Schlafly is a lawyer, conservative political analyst and author of 20 books. Her latest, written with co-author Suzanne Venker, is "The Flipside of Feminism" published in March by WorldNetDaily. She can be contacted by e-mail at phyllis@eagleforum.org. To find out more about Phyllis Schlafly and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM