The parable of King Obama

Jonah, the guy in the Bible, gets swallowed by a whale then spit out safely three days later having learned his lesson.

It’s a fine story, as children’s stories go. But warning: Don’t take it literally.

Just as we should not take literally the modern political parable of good King Barack Obama who saved the country from Bad King Bush’s “depression” by spending us into prosperity.

Liberals find the story of Good King Obama and his magic budget comforting.

But if any president could fix a deficit by printing and spending more money, everyone with a Monopoly game would be rich. That’s how fiscal responsibility works and everyone who’s ever had to balance a checkbook knows it.

To balance a budget there are no magic beans, unicorns or free lunches. Be it your family budget or the nation’s budget, spending more than you make does nothing but create more debt. And the quicker Americans reach a “Jonah” moment with that truth, the sooner we’ll have a shot of returning to economic stability.

Not long ago, while using Las Vegas as a straw man to warn against splurge spending, President Obama said government must control spending just like “families across the country are tightening their belts.”

But like just about everything else this president says, his deeds run counter to his words.

And so last week it was announced that Obama had “tightened” government’s belt in exactly the opposite way “families across the country” do. He spent a boatload more in February, piling 14 percent ($220.9 billion) more red ink onto the deficit.

He’s now taken the country to new deficit heights. His spending will total $3.5 trillion for the first half of his first term. As Jeffrey Anderson wrote recently in Investor’s Business Daily, “Obama’s deficit spending for his first two years in office will exceed Bush’s deficit spending for his entire eight-year presidency.”

As for this notion that his wild spending held a depression at bay, Anderson points out that Obama’s deficits dwarf those of the 1930s.

“In fact,” he says, “whether measured in constant dollars, real dollars or even as a percentage of the gross domestic product, Obama’s average deficit in his first two years will more than triple the average deficit during the Great Depression.”

The fish story upon which King Obama stakes our future is that this spending is actually a good thing. It is good, so goes the theory, because of the “Keynesian Multiplier,” which holds that increased spending erases a deficit over time by sparking the economy and thus raising more money for government coffers.

Most adults don’t believe that anymore. Yet Democrats hope we’ll buy the idea that spending begets deficit reduction and bigger spending begets bigger deficit reduction.

They may as well tell us that a big fish really did eat a guy then spit him out unharmed.

Which would be, if not more believable, far less dangerous.

Sherman Frederick (sfrederick@ reviewjournal.com) is publisher of the Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media.