When President Obama's former top political advisor attempts to explain the President's multiple scandal problems by saying that government has gotten so big that one man, even if he's Barack Obama, cannot keep up with or control things, then you know the size and scope of government has truly gone off the rails.
Yet, that's exactly what happened recently when David Axelrod blamed the administration's myriad scandals on the fact that government is just too big for even the intellectual giants in the White House to keep on track. As Axelrod said, “Part of being President is that there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast.”
Just take spending for example. The federal government’s spending has more than doubled since 2000. Federal debt has increased $6 trillion since President Obama was elected. With spending racing forward at such a rate it is no wonder that scandals, unaccountability and cronyism are so voluminous. Barely days into his first term, the President pushed the largest single "stimulus" bill in American history. Almost $1 trillion was wasted in the most profligate government spending gusher ever passed into law.
President Obama ran on the notion that government must be large to solve our nation’s problems-- to make life better. We were told that through big spending programs like the stimulus, TARP and other bailouts, we would get the economy moving again. Instead, the private sector languishes while government continues to grow. It’s also worth noting that presidents from both parties tend to grow government; in fact, under the Bush Administration spending and the size of government grew massively. Democrats may be worse offenders on the government spending front but Republicans failed when they had the opportunity to rein in the federal government from 2001 through 2006.
The result of these efforts isn’t an agile, effective government. It’s a government constrained by its own size, weighed down by layers and layers of bureaucracy that choke off private job creation and bring more cronyism and more waste. Obama’s promise has fallen flat: life is certainly not better for most people in America. Big government hasn’t solved our problems, it’s created different ones.
Incredibly, President Obama’s biggest expansion of government is still looming on the horizon: his Washington, D.C. takeover of our health care. ObamaCare’s ever-increasing cost is now estimated at over $1.8 trillion for just the first decade (and since when did official cost estimates of government programs ever prove accurate?) Aside from the cost, the expansive new regulations in the law hang over the heads of American citizens and business owners alike, threatening to bury them in red tape.
Most ominously, the federal agency that will be enforcing all of ObamaCare's mandates, taxes, and rules and regulations will be the Internal Revenue Service. If we cannot trust the IRS to refrain from an unfair assault on groups that oppose President Obama's big government policies, then how on earth can Americans trust the IRS to oversee their personal health care? That's a question we will be asking folks across the nation in the coming days and weeks.
Not to keep anyone awake at night or anything, but Sarah Ingram, the very person who oversaw the IRS division currently under investigation, was promoted and is now the person in charge of enforcing the President's new health care law. Sleep tight.