Our young and inexperienced President must have never once seriously contemplated what would happen if he and his liberal colleagues in Congress were wrong about their fantasies that government spending could turn around an ailing economy. They must have been so duped by the liberal myth that government was the all-knowing, all-powerful Wizard of Oz into that they did not even think once about what would happen if the myth proved to be false.

Sadly for the rest of the country, neither did many others think it through. We blindly fell for the flim-flam theory that massive government spending programs would be as quick and powerful as the unbiased and untargeted (and well proven) option of tax breaks. Tax breaks LEAVE money in the economy, in the hands of individuals to purchase things and make payments, and in the hands of businesses to purchase things and hire (or hold onto) employees.

Tax cuts act immediately. Government spending takes a year to plan – minimum. Supposedly the liberals in Congress who have come into power after decades of bloating the federal bureaucracy with endless rules, regulations and processes knows this. But they never seriously considered what would happen to the nation if their hype and lies actually crashed back to Earth.

Obama and the liberals in Congress have admitted openly that the jobs spending under the massive and clearly wasteful stimulus bill will not really kick in for months to come – still. I mentioned back when the stimulus bill passed the political backlash that would arise after a spring of a worsening job market, after a 4th of July of a worsening job market, after a labor day of a worsening job market, of a Thanksgiving with a worsening job market. This is what I wrote about our future on February 22nd:

The man has never had to manage a budget – that is now absolutely clear. You cannot deal with ‘deficits’ without revenues to offset the costs. The problem is the recession is tanking the tax revenues as people lose jobs and businesses tighten up or fail. There have been reports of massive drops in state and federal revenues, which have not even yet begun to really be assessed as to their impact. Raising taxes is not going to replace those revenue losses, losses now made all the worst by the spendulus bill.

When the liberal DC democrats passed that massive spendulus bill, they made the problem even worse. They begin with tax handouts to non tax-payers, which will further deplete the revenue stream, what little is left of it. Then they added massive spending programs that will not produce a single new job for at least a year, digging the hole between revenues and outlays even wider.

This was the first domino in an economic screw up of epic proportions. If the federal government had cut spending and taxes, the economy would have responded and we would be looking a lot better. But what do you do when you flub your chance to turn things around early? What do you do when you spend like a drunken sailor and wake up with the hangover plus the original problem you were pretending to solve?

What we face with the failed stimulus bill is a stalled and sinking economy. There may be some signs for the fat cats on Wall Street and in DC, but average America is still sinking – albeit slower since the bottom is around here somewhere. But the mistake the DC liberals and President Obama made has not yet finished doing its damage. We now are in a cascade of failures emanating out from the one horribly bad decision like dominos falling.

The news is finally coming out of DC on how bad the ripple effect is going to be. We are in for massive deficits for a long time, because deficits happen when government spends more than they have or tax receipts fall. The liberals in DC have created the perfect fiscal nightmare in that they have gone on a never before seen spending binge – as shown in this chart of expected deficit for the government fiscal year ending in September compared to the previous years:

And their delayed ‘stimulus’ spending – which won’t show up until late this year, early next – means we will see historically low tax receipts for some time to come as well:

The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation’s plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.
The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.
Other figures in an Associated Press analysis underscore the recession’s impact: Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.

These numbers are just mind boggling. Is it not amazing the depth and breadth of this teachable moment? Is it not just jaw dropping awesome how badly the DC liberals screwed us up? Not just endless unemployment and underemployment problems, but record breaking deficits and record losses of revenues.

All because they were believed in a naive liberal fairy tale that said tax cuts were bad and targeted government spending programs to promote their idea of proper behavior would suffice.

I like what Ed Morrissey noted about the revenue picture under Bush and Obama – because it really destroys the liberal myth about left and right and business and government:

The big takeaway on this graph is the difference between corporate and individual tax revenues at various points on the economic cycle.  Despite the oft-repeated canard that the Bush administration favored big business, the biggest increases in corporate tax revenue in the last generation came during the Reagan and Bush years.  During most of the Clinton administration, individual tax revenues rose faster than corporate tax revenues.  That is remarkably true during the peaks of economic growth in 1984-5 and 2004-7.

And of course the current crop of DC liberals have crashed the whole system in upon itself. The liberals talk a lot of good platitudes, but the truth is they could no more manage our nation’s economy than win a war with a third world nation without an Air Force and Navy. They are truly just as bad on the economy as they are on national defense. Maybe even worse.

And now they want to take over our health care. I will give them this, they are an arrogant bunch who can dismiss and deny their failures like no one else.