Barack Obama - Hypocrite

In Wednesday's debate, President Obama said this: "And so budgets reflect choices."  Indeed, this has been a liberal talking point- that Mr. Romney's budget somehow shows he doesn't care for the poor.  Now, this falls flat on several levels.

First, it fails on a personal level.  Mitt Romney routinely gives 20 - 30% of his income to charities.  Those are hardly the actions of someone who "doesn't care."  By contrast, Barack Obama's donations to charities have been around 10%, and that only since he was elected President.  Before that, he averaged in the single digits.  The Bidens are even more tight fisted.

Second, it fails on a policy level.  Mitt Romney has proposed a budget.  It is a budget designed to get us back to a balanced budget... eventually.  Barack Obama's proposed budget projected trillion dollar deficits for the foreseeable future.  When you're willing to spend my grandchildren's money, there's a lot of things you can do for "the poor" that you can't when you're trying not to burden future generations with our profligate spending.  One of those approaches is caring, the other is simply pandering.  I'll let you decide which is which.

Moreover, President Obama's proposed budgets have not gotten more than a handful of votes between them in either the House or the Senate.  These haven't been "party line votes."  They have been mass repudiations of the President's budgets.  Proposing a budget you know won't pass, and which garners a single digit of votes between the two houses, is functionally the same as not proposing a budget at all.

This charge is rank hypocrisy of the worst kind.  It is a cynical and dishonest attack.

Finally (for this piece, at least), the attack fails on a moral level.  Republicans detest poverty, but we love the impoverished.  We hate poverty so much we want there to be less of it.  There's an old saying that, "If you want more of something, subsidize it."  Well, that's exactly what our government is doing right now with poverty- we are subsidizing the poor.  Republicans are not advocating a complete abandonment of the impoverished.  We are saying that the Federal Government is particularly poorly suited to helping the poor.  The simple size and scope of the Federal Bureaucracy makes the administration of any but the very most straight forward welfare programs untenable.  That's a purely practical consideration.  More important is that the Constitution does not give the Federal Government the power to do anything about the poor at all.

So here is the summary of the Republican proposals for the poor: Send the duties, as much as is practical, back to the States.  The States will be much more efficient at handling these programs.  Reduce regulation and taxation to grow the economy, this will allow more jobs to be created and increase wages naturally.  These are not policies which harm the poor, but help them.  Specifically they are policies which help lift them out of poverty, instead of simply subsidizing their poverty and increasing their dependence.