You Can Always Tell When a Politician is Lying

Others intent on cutting spending have pointed to Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere" as a wasteful project. I agree and believe that it represents the first type of project we should cut. But it's wrong to single out one state's pork project. If we're serious about shared responsibility, let's eliminate all pork projects in all states. To find $50 billion in tax breaks, we could postpone a planned tax break for millionaires, and we could temporarily roll back one of the tax cuts for those who make an income of more than $2 million per year.

Mr. Obama is calling for fiscal restraint, which I loudly applaud. I also applaud his effort to curb entitlement tax cuts. Taxes should be shared equally across all Americans. Providing cuts to a specific class or interest group make the incorrect assumption that there money is more likely to provide economic growth that another person’s money.

However, I question Mr. Obama’s sincerity. He rightly points out that restraining pork projects across every jurisdiction is better than singling out specific projects, but Mr Obama didn’t put forth an amendment to cut projects across the board. He didn’t step in front of the Senate to say that he would support the amendment to put an end to the “Bridge to Nowhere” if a similar project were killed in each state, or even putting a project from his own state on the block. Instead, Mr. Obama, quite clearly, affirmed the practice of providing pork to pad the pocket of incumbents and killed Coburn’s attempt to bring fiscal responsibility back into the Senate.

It’s easy to see this as a pre-campaign speech (especially since that is what it is) so that he has something to point to when he is attacked as a tax-and-spend Democrat. When judging a politician pay special attention to judge them by what they do rather than what they say.