The Foundry

The symbolic nature of the Senate’s budget authorization process lends itself to occasional gamesmanship, and Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO) took full advantage last night. Allard combed through Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) many campaign promises and compiled a list of 188 new spending proposals that he then packaged together and offered as an amendment to the Fiscal 2009 budget plan. Allard calculated that for the 111 proposals for which cost estimated were possible, Obama’s promises would cost the American taxpayer $300 billion per year and $1.4 trillion over five years. Allard released a floor statement highlighting the size of this spending package, including:

• The $300 billion is more than the $294 billion the U.S. spent on imported oil last year.
• Obama’s current tax raise proposal would cover only $225 billion over 5 years … far short of the $1.4 trillion in spending.
• To finance just the first year of $300 billion in spending, Congress would have to raise taxes on the top 1% of tax payers by 57%

When Obama was forced to the floor to vote against the amendment he gave a hard glare to the Republican side of the aisle and said, “Hey Allard, You working this hard?” Allard only wanted to raise the issue of run away taxing and spending, and joined Obama in voting against the measure which lost 97-0.