Obama’s budget will make us the most socialist country in the world

In the famous tale “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” Jabez Stone sold his soul to the devil to enjoy seven years of prosperity. He was even able to bargain for three more years before the “mortgage fell due,” but regardless the mortgage came due and the devil was there to collect.

America has sold its soul for unsustainable entitlements, and the price could very well be our capitalistic society as we move closer and closer to socialism.

Socialism, as Winston Churchill defined it, is a philosophy of failure. Yet when President Barack Obama fired the CEO of GM, the American public barely batted an eye. As financial markets have teetered on the brink of going under, the U.S. government has stepped in, taken ownership, arbitrarily decided what companies will fail and pumped and inflated others with fat TARP and bailout funds, but at a devil of a cost.

What is truly disturbing is the American people would gladly hand over their hard-won freedoms for simple short-term financial security. In fact, a March 2009 Gallup Poll found that while “64 percent of Republicans say they place more trust in businesses to solve the nation’s economic problems, 72 percent of Democrats say they trust the government more, underscoring the enormous philosophical divide in the way Republicans and Democrats view the government’s role.”

Metrics do not lie and metrically speaking, we’re there. Newsweek’s Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas, grandson of Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas, noted, “A decade ago, U.S. government spending was 34.3 percent of GDP compared with 48.2 percent in the euro zone — a roughly 14-point gap, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In 2010, U.S. spending is expected to be 39.9 percent of GDP, compared with 47.1 percent in the euro zone — a gap of less than 8 points. As entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French.”

The once-great nation is being bamboozled. If there is one thing that Americans learned from the Bush administration, it’s that we cannot spend our way to prosperity. Yet under Obama’s proposed $3.6 trillion, five-year budget, taxes are going to skyrocket across the taxpaying spectrum to pay for the market’s financial failures that are amounting to trillions of taxpayer dollars; to compensate for the Obama administration’s overreaching and untenable universal health care; and the planned government takeover of student loans.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that Obama’s plan would “generate unsustainable deficits averaging almost $1 trillion a year for the next decade.”

And U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg, senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee and one-time Obama pick for Commerce Secretary, recently made a harrowing point on NPR that under such a budget, it would dramatically expand government in the out years and take our debt up to about 80 percent of our Gross National Product. Gregg further pointed out that a country cannot even become a member of the European Union if its debt is 60 percent of its GNP, meaning America would not even be good enough to be a socialist country.

Unfortunately, voters are passively observing as the federal government continues, at accelerated speeds, to whittle away our civil liberties and eventually our democracy.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned, “Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

America, under the prescribed course of Obama and the Democratic congressional majority, is being led into indentured servitude to big government and our oh-so-modern society is becoming a replica of the very government model our forefathers shed blood to defeat.

Selling freedom’s soul under the guise of a bailout may seem like a good way to rob Peter to pay Paul, but the people should not expect Daniel Webster to come to our nation’s defense when the devil comes calling for the mortgage.

Karen Hart worked for President Ronald Reagan during his post-White House years. She is a freelance speechwriter in Washington, D.C.