Impending double-dipped recession

Obama promised change, but I'm not sure this is what America had in mind.

Congressional spending has increased prediction numbers to increase drastically over the next decade according to the Congressional Budget Office.

I am not going to point the blame at one person as most of you think I would.

I am going to blame everyone including the Republicans. I am a Republican with an opinion. I am allowed to express this opinion because I have the courage to and most of all, I voted.

I had to vote for someone who likes to call himself a republican when he really isn't. I am sure a lot of people would agree that, making that kind of a decision is really aggravating. So as I digress, I will continue on to doing what I do best, criticizing.

There are three ways out of this. The easiest would be for our politicians to just stop spending. But that's not likely to happen.

The other solution is for the economy to start growing. But with these massive deficits driving inflation and discouraging investment, that's not likely to happen either.

Indeed, the reason why the Obama administration had to up its own deficit projections was because their rosy predictions for economic growth in the coming years were about as believable as fairy tales.

Obama's people projected 3% GDP growth starting in April to the end of this year, and then 4% GDP growth starting in 2010 through 2013. That 4% clip would be double the roughly 2% growth we saw between 2004 and 2008, a time of relative economic strength - even if it was built upon government-created bubbles in the credit markets.

Nobody could possibly take those predictions seriously any more, so Obama and his people revised them to be more in line with reality. And the deficit figures jumped.

The final solution would be to raise taxes, and I think that's going to be the end game. We're going to see massive tax hikes to pay for Obama's "throw deficit spending at it" solution to everything, but will that really fix the problem?

The big news of late - though some of us have been talking about it for some time now - is the possibility of a double-dip recession. One in which we see a brief amount of recovery only to see a drop back into negative economic growth. If we raise taxes on this already weak economy we will see a double-dip recession.

I think - and the CBO predicted the same back before the "stimulus" spending was passed - that if Obama and the rest of the federal government had just sat on their hands we'd be starting a climb toward recovery at the end of this year.

But as things stand now, with seemingly exponential growth in our national deficits and little doubt about impending tax hikes, economic recovery is a distant hope. I think we're on rails heading toward a Japanese-style "lost decade."

On a related note, how pathetic is it that alternative to Obama and his Democrats and their record-setting deficit spending are the Republicans who oversaw record-setting deficits of their own when they were in power?

The choices right now seem to be the party that grows government slowly, and the party that grows government exponentially.

Makes me think we need new leaders all the way around.

This writer can be contacted at opinion@theeastcarolinian.com.