Obama will be remembered as the man who accelerated America’s mad dash toward bankruptcy. He will be remembered as the leader who promoted a culture of dependency. He will be remembered as the figure who sacrificed a dream of national unity upon the altar of big government liberalism.

BY Matthew Continetti at The Weekly Standard

The liberal line is that President Obama has secured his place in history by signing into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. And secured it he has. Henceforth Obama will be remembered as the man who accelerated America’s mad dash toward bankruptcy. He will be remembered as the leader who promoted a culture of dependency. He will be remembered as the figure who sacrificed a dream of national unity upon the altar of big government liberalism. It’s true: Obama is now a president of consequence. And almost all of those consequences are bad.

The fiscal picture was bleak before Obama made it worse. Government debt is 60 percent of the gross domestic product and climbing. The deficit is projected to remain above 4 percent of GDP for the next decade. The week before the president signed his health care reform into law, Moody’s warned that America’s AAA bond rating may be downgraded. The day before the signing ceremony, the nation learned that Warren Buffett is a safer investment than U.S. treasuries. One needn’t look across the Atlantic, where a penniless Greece is a supplicant to the IMF, to see our future. Look to California, where the economy is crippled by high taxes, high spending, and burdensome debt.

President Obama is an intelligent man. He knew there was no way a massive entitlement could get through Congress when spending, deficit, and debt are major issues. So he claimed that health care reform would help ameliorate America’s fiscal problem, not exacerbate it. And for support he had the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which found that, under a certain set of conditions—spending cuts, Medicare cuts, new taxes—health care reform would not only pay for itself but would reduce the deficit.

But what happens under real world conditions? What happens when the Medicare cuts and the excise tax disappear and the subsidies are more generous than expected? When Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin asked the CBO these questions, he was told the deficit would increase by a considerable margin. Which outcome is more likely: a Congress that cuts services, imposes taxes on favored constituencies, and refrains from spending? Or a Congress that goes instead on a fact-finding mission to Djibouti while making promises it cannot keep?

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