I was reading an article today from the Money Game talking about Barack Obama and his comments on the VAT tax (value added tax). What is interesting about the comment is Obama said “my first priority is to figure out how can we reduce wasteful spending…”

My thought right here was, “who needs to reduce wasteful spending?”

The American people or the Federal Government?

From the looks of the following graph, the Federal Government’s spending is out of control.

In addition, I received an e-mail from a relative the other day (which is the source of the graph) stating:

“…babbled again today about Obama inheriting a huge deficit from Bush.

Budgets do not come from the White House. They come from Congress, and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democratic Party. They controlled the budget process for FY 2008 and FY 2009, as well as FY 2010 and FY 2011.

In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases.

For FY 2009, though, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the FY 2009 budgets.

And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete FY 2009…

In a nutshell, what Obama is saying is, “I inherited a deficit that I voted for and then I voted to expand that deficit four-fold since January 20th.”

So much for the dog & pony show and lip service.

By the way, did CEObama pay 90% income taxes on his $5.5 million (or part of it) as did CEO’s who received bonuses – which were allowed by Congress in the bailout bill?