Sometimes I wonder if these are just typos but, is everything in hundreds of billions these days? We just allocated almost $800 billion for the economic stimulus. No one knows where this money is coming from–the government doesn’t have money. Now, there is a leak that Obama’s budget will include $634 over 10 years to deal with healthcare.

I want everyone to be able to afford health care. The problem is not that the free market doesn’t work in health care–it can work just fine. The problem is that government keeps regulating and subsidizing poor health care models. Car insurance doesn’t cover tune-ups and oil checks, why does health insurance cover regular check-ups? This will only drive up the price of health care.

The big question right now is not about whether we should have universal health care or not. The question is how are we going to pay for this? If Obama is planning to cut the budget deficit by 50% in 2013, he is not going in the right direction.

The stimulus bill was a bad idea and history will show that it will be money thrown into a black hole. We are still maintaining out military empire all over the world–that alone costs almost $1 trillion. We are going to expand the war in Afghanistan–that will cost money. The economy is shrinking.

So how are we going to pay for this? Taxes? The American people can’t afford to give more in taxes–we need to tax less. Borrowing? That is just another means of taxation–future taxation. Printing presses? That is also a tax–a hidden one where our money loses purchasing power.

Obama is not change. He is doing exactly what Bush did. Spend the country into oblivion–except Bush spent slower.

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the headlines during Obama’s first week in office that said he had signed an executive order to close the Liberty-destroying Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility. Then I read the news and it was a closure within a year–I got more skeptical.

I don’t know how long it takes to close down an illegal detention facility. I have never run one. I did not and do not expect real change from Obama. He has been doing more of the same since he stepped into the White House.

Now that Attorney General Holder says that closing Gitmo will be difficult, I’m even more skeptical of its closure. The executive order to close Gitmo feels more like a dog and pony show than anything real.

Holder called Guantanamo “a well-run, professional facility”. I’m pretty sure treating people as criminals without due process and without any evidence makes it poorly run and unprofessional. Unless we are talking about a well run internment camp used for the torturing of human beings.

I made a bet with a German fellow about Gitmo. He said Obama would close it down in his first week. I said, no way. So who is right? We bet a beer–I want the beer.

It seems like every time I see a Russia Today video with Ron Paul on LRC, it is an interview conducted by my friend, Dina Gusovsky. I am jealous every time.

I did not see Obama’s address to Congress on TV but, I did catch some of it on YouTube. I read about most of the address from news articles. As was expected, this address was about the economic crisis and how the recent stimulus bill would fix things. If you’ve ready anything I’ve written about the bill, you’ll know that it will not work–Obama is just blowing smoke.

I wasn’t sure that I was going to blog about this at almost 3AM on the East coast but, then I heard this statement from his address:

“Tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”

Of course he did not go on to explain how this will happen. He just says it will. As if he can command the forces of economics to do his bidding if he just signs it into law. Let’s not be ridiculous. You can no more change the laws of economics as you can change the law of gravity.

“Because we cannot consign our nation to an open-ended recession,” Obama had urged Congress to do whatever proves necessary. What does that even mean? Completely vague and useless as is most of Obama’s fantasticly spoken speeches. It all sounds great, it just doesn’t mean anything.

The recession was never “open-ended”. It would end as soon as the bad debt was liquidated from the system. A lot of pain and suffering would have occured but, the recession would not turn into a depression. The almost $800 billion stimulus bill will make a recession that would have lasted a couple of years in the worse case scenario to something that is now open-ended.

No one knows how long this will last. You cannot solve the problem of too much credit and spending with more credit and spending. The idea that you need to fill the “gap” left behind by a decrease in consumer spending with government spending is idiotic.

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Obama has pledged $900 million to rebuild Gaza after Israel decimated it earlier in the year. I am not against helping the people of Gaza get their life back in order. I was against Israel’s ridiculous invasion of the territory. The irony is that we give Israel money to bomb the living daylights out of Gaza and then we pay to fix it!

Almost the same thing we do in Iraq: blow up all their infrastructure so that we can rebuild it. Great idea! In a time when we our economy is getting worse by the day, where did we get $900 million for Gaza? Did we cut spending somewhere? The government has no savings. How are we funding this?

“Administration officials said Monday, according to The New York Times, that the aid would not be given to Hamas, which controls Gaza, but would go through nongovernmental organziations.”

I’m also unsure how this is going to happen. If Hamas controls Gaza and you give money to organizations in Gaza, how do you make sure Hamas doesn’t get a hold of some of it?