Time for an ‘American Reset’

[Geee]

Front Page Magazine:

The Obama administration made a big deal about its “Russian Reset”—a policy aimed at emphasizing U.S.-Russian relations by basically starting over. The fact that the Russian Reset yielded little more than some embarrassing moments for the secretary of state is a subject for another essay. What’s relevant here is that after some 40 months of President Barack Obama, it’s time for an “American Reset.”

Reset federal spending

President Obama has added $5 trillion in debt. The federal government has spent more than 24 percent of GDP in each of President Obama’s years in the White House, far above the historic average of 20 percent. The federal debt, as a share of GDP, is the highest it has been since World War II—when we had a much better reason to run up record debt. And each and every year he has been in office, President Obama has carried a deficit above $1 trillion—an unprecedented feat.

 

Not even the president’s friends in the mainstream media can ignore the reality that the Obama administration has engaged in the most profligate spending spree in American history. The Washington Post, for instance, notes that “the compound annual growth rate for President Obama’s spending starting in 2009 is 5.2 percent” and “in every case, the president wanted to spend more money than he ended up getting.”

In other words, Congress actually reined the president in—but not before he spawned the Affordable Care Act. According to his own numbers, the president’s healthcare behemoth will cost $1 trillion. That number will surely grow larger than his actuaries predict. It pays to recall Washington’s poor track record when it comes to out-year projections. The Wall Street Journal reminds us that in 1965, Congress estimated Medicare would cost $3.1 billion in 1970. The actual cost was $6.8 billion. Two years later, Congress predicted that Medicare would consume just $12 billion in 1990. In fact, it was $110 billion.

Given that the president found a way to grow the federal government by 25 percent—with little to show for his stimulus programs, bailouts and government takeovers—returning spending to 2008 levels seems eminently sensible.

Reset regulations

Contrary to the president’s recent slip of the tongue, the private sector isn’t doing fine. One of the reasons is the vast web of regulations he has spun in the banking, financial, healthcare and energy sectors. A Heritage Foundation study found that the Obama administration has issued four times as many major regulations—regulations costing $100 million or more—as its predecessor. The result: taxpayers and industry have been forced to cough up $46 billion to comply with new regulations—more than five times the cost of Bush-era regs.

Some of President Obama’s most costly regulations are not even fully realized yet. Take the EPA’s regulations on coal, for instance. As The New York Times reports, 100 of the 500 coal-burning power plants in the United States will be closed in the next few years largely “because new pollution rules have made coal plants more costly.” Retrofitting a coal-electricity plant in Kentucky in order to meet the Obama administration’s coal-killing regulatory requirements will cost $1 billion and has triggered a 30-percent increase in electricity rates, according to the Times.