$800 Billion just isn’t enough!

From the Wall Street Journal…

Obama Seeks to Restore Some Stimulus Spending

WASHINGTON -- The White House is seeking to restore funding cut by the Senate for schools, health insurance and computerizing health records as the economic-stimulus plan headed into a final round of negotiations in Congress, with top lawmakers struggling to bring the price of the two-year package down to $800 billion.

Why, we can’t spend a mere $800 billion! The President is being somewhat petulant that he may not get a bill that someone else wrote for him that doesn’t contain every penny he thinks it should. That is somewhat understandable given how little time he spent in the Senate and in the Illinois legislature and how undistinguished that time was, so you can excuse him if he is a little fuzzy on the details of how a bill becomes a law. Perhaps he can watch the Schoolhouse Rock video?

Shockingly, to get a little extra pork President Obama is nobly willing to cut back on tax cuts.

To make room for added spending, the White House, joined by House Democratic leaders, is pressing to scale back certain Senate-passed tax breaks, including measures intended to boost auto and home sales.

Ah, I see. So a “stimulus” bill that is designed to jump start the economy shouldn’t contain tax breaks to improve auto and home sales that might actually spur the economy if it means we have to give up spending on “computerizing health records”. Nothing will jumpstart the economy like “computerizing health records”! Hopefully, this brash insistence by the President will lead to the death of this fiasco. The three RINOs who voted for it (Republicans In Name Only) have threatened to grow a spine and pretend to be Republicans if the bill is tinkered with…

The three Republicans who voted for the plan -- Sen. Collins, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine -- are monitoring negotiations. Sen. Snowe said the final package must preserve small-business tax breaks and a measure ensuring that unemployment benefits are tax-free for some workers, among other things. Sen. Collins insists that the cost be kept to $800 billion. Sen. Specter warned that the Senate bill should "come back virtually intact" in the final compromise.

Without the support of those three stalwarts, the bill might die. We can only hope. I wish that the media would press President Obama on the fact that this is not a bill designed in any way, shape or form to stimulate the depressed economy and is instead just a massive long-term spending bill that will have minimal impact (which likely would be negative) full of liberal social engineering. At least then we could have an honest debate on this massive increase in debt and the scope and scale of the Federal government. Instead we have our President doing his best Chicken Little impression to push an ever more skeptical American public into supporting a massive transference of wealth from future generations.