by Tom Shields
February 16, 2009

We have a saying in the Shields house: “you don’t buy groceries with a credit card.” You may use this rule yourself.

This doesn’t literally mean that we don’t use credit cards at the market, especially since we earn frequent flyer miles with every swipe.

It’s simply the rule that commands us to live within our means. Pay off the credit cards every month. Pay as we go, and don’t go buying things unless there’s a way to pay for them.

Debt is something that is reserved for big-ticket items, like cars and homes. But even then, we go out of our way to pay them off early, to pay for the things we’ve already purchased, to be prudent, responsible, and to stay clear of financial troubles.

It’s a conservative philosophy that was apparently shared by the delegates to our state constitutional convention, who wisely directed that our state operate on a balanced budget.

Imagine what our state debt would look like if the legislature didn’t have to balance the budget every year. And how many billions of dollars in debt local governments and school districts would be in if it weren’t illegal to run in the red. Can you now imagine giving Kwame an open credit card?

This appears to be exactly what we have done with President Obama and his merry band of Democrats in Congress. We’ve given them a Presidential Express Card, with no limit and no accountability for paying the bill. We’ve sent them to the Washington Mall on a spending spree.

What started out as an effort to stimulate the economy — kick-start it — has turned into a trillion-dollar Obamaboondoggle, packed with pork and political payoffs that will put our children and their children in debt for decades yet to come.

Without a single member of Congress having the opportunity to actually read the 1,100-page spending program, American taxpayers are now stuck with a $1.2-trillion bill, when you add interest on top of the debt. That’s about $3,500 for every man, woman and child in the country.

Some of my favorite examples of where this thing lost its way:

• Paying to stimulate those Hollywood movie producers to the tune of $248 million (maybe he actually does listen to Granholm?)
• $25 billion to stimulate teacher salaries
• $160 million for those “paid volunteers” (think about this one now folks — Paid. Volunteers.) at Corporation for National and Community Service (is that how you spell ACORN?)
• $650 million for digital TV converters (how many of these are manufactured in the USA?)
• $248 million for furniture for the Office of Homeland Security, a building the average taxpayer probably can’t even get into.

With all the talk of stimulating our economy by fixing America’s infrastructure, only 12 percent of funds are slated to find their way to repairing roads and bridges.

There’s almost nothing for the small businesses — the very sector that has been creating all the jobs.

The taxpayer wasn’t forgotten though.

There’s that $13-a-week middle class tax cut that Obama promised. And, if you make it through this year, there’s another $7 a week next year. If a taxpayer saves that money up, in two years he can take a family on vacation to one of our national parks to see where billions of tax dollars went to build new energy efficient visitor centers.

No one who supported this package can say with a straight face how many jobs this Obamanation will create. At first we heard 4 million new jobs. Now they say 3.5 million jobs saved or created. Economists working with the Administration are saying it’s more like 2.2 million. That’s a cost of somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 per job. Where do I sign up?

We must be getting lower paid jobs here in Michigan, because our governor says the $18 billion coming our way will only save or create 100,000 jobs. That’s only $180,000 per job. Of course, they were saying 180,000 new jobs just two weeks earlier, so who knows where the truth is.

The Obama Administration also didn’t want to take the chance that a bigger tax break would prevent spending on things like an $8-billion bullet-train from L.A. to Las Vegas, conveniently added by Senate Majority Leader Reid (D-NV). God forbid they should give us larger tax breaks and we’d go off and spend it on one of those Detroit-made cars.

Beside the wasteful spending, the debt, and the fact that we aren’t equipped to efficiently spend that kind of money this fast, one of the biggest concerns many of us are having is that this spend-o-bama is just the beginning. These spending levels will become the rule, and not the exception.

Unlike Rush Limbaugh, I don’t hope that Obama fails. I believe we all want him to succeed. But the economy won’t turn around until America’s confidence is turned around and restored.

Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, said, “you never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

But at a time that our new president had an opportunity to take the path less taken, he decided to follow the merry bad of spenders down the same old road we’ve been on for years and years and years. He just picked up the pace.

Tom Shields is founder and president of Marketing Resource Group, a Lansing-based political marketing and public relations firm.