Obama’s Fear-Mongering Exposes Warped Priorities

With less than twenty days to go till the Treasury’s August 2 debt ceiling deadline, President Obama’s attempts to breach the ranks of no-tax-increase Republicans are increasingly desperate.  On Tuesday, the President announced that social security checks may be among the first casualties of the debt-limit impasse, a blatant attempt to scare America’s senior citizens and force Republicans to compromise their principles.  Yet such brazen fear-mongering is also a liability for the President, exposing his skewed priorities.

Should social security checks fail to go out on August 3, it will be because President Obama chose not to send them.  The Social Security obligations the government is expected to meet on August 3 total $22 billion – far below the $73 billion cash balance Treasury is expected to have on hand the same day.  In total, the government will take in around $2.2 trillion in revenues this year, enough to fulfill major entitlement obligations with cash to spare.  Thus the only thing Obama’s hyperbole revelas is that, the President places the needs of seniors below the following list of “vital” government expenditures:

• Treadmills for Shrimp – the National Science Foundation wasted $3 billion dollars last year on a host of inane studies, employee misconduct, and outright fraud.
• Pollution Reduction in China – the Environmental Protection Agency has spent $27 million on foreign air-pollution prevention programs.
• Outrageous Employee Compensation – over 77,000 federal employees receive compensation packages in excess of their state governor.
• Improper Grants – a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found that the federal government wastes $125.4 billion on improper and fraudulent payments.
• Houses that Don’t Exist – the Department of Housing and Urban Development has spent $400 million on projects that don’t exist or have been abandoned.
• Luxury Limousines for Bureaucrats – limousine purchases have increased by 73% under President Obama.
• Doing the Same Thing Again, and Again, and Again – the GAO estimates that the federal government wastes $100 billion every year on redundant programs.

Instead of trying to frighten seniors, the President should be focusing on working with Congressional leaders to rein in wasteful government spending and reform unsustainable entitlement programs.  Scare tactics will not coerce Republicans into sacrificing their principles, but it will tell seniors that their social security checks are trumped by bloated bureaucratic paychecks and government waste.