Is Obama’s Treasury Secretary playing chicken with our credit ratings agency? Today, at a House Appropriations Committee hearing, Tim Geithner was asked about Moody’s “warning shots” of America losing its triple A credit rating because of increasing deficits and debt, to which he responded:

                There's not a chance that's going to happen to our country.

We hope for the sake of our country that Geithner is right, because as CNBC’s Trish Regan explained today on MSNBC, a downgrade in our credit rating would mean Obama’s binge spending would cost us even more than it does now because it would be riskier for countries to lend to us.

But Obama’s binge spending has already left us with unprecedented deficits. The last thing we need is to pay higher interest rates on the money we are forced to borrow in order to pay for Obama’s binge spending agenda.

President Obama likes to boast that he runs the most transparent administration in history but whether it’s shielding union cronies, crafting health care reform in secret or stemming waste and fraud in the stimulus program you’ll find that his actions fall far short of his promises. Now that list of shortcomings includes failing to accurately maintain USAspending.gov, which tracks government spending on federal contracts. The website was conceived by then-Senator Obama and is currently maintained by his own Office of Management and Budget but an audit of its records by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) turned up several problems:

After reviewing 100 federal contracts, the GAO also found "widespread inconsistencies" in what appeared on the website and what was contained in records provided by the agencies. Auditors, for example, found discrepancies in where the work took place and the purpose of the contracts.

When he was a senator, Obama hailed the website as a ... more

For the past year, President Obama and Congressional Democrats have been ignoring the American people, 73 percent of whom want to start over on health care reform or stop their government-run health care experiment altogether. But The Financial Times notes that Obama is not only ignoring the American people; he’s ignoring experts who say that Obama’s binge spending is threatening American’s credit rating:

Moody’s Investor Service, the credit rating agency, will fire a warning shot at the US on Monday, saying that unless the country gets public finances into better shape than the Obama administration projects there would be ‘downward pressure’ on its triple A credit rating ... Standard & Poor’s warned last week the triple A status of the US was at risk unless the country adopted a credible medium-term plan to rein in fiscal spending.

With a projected record $1.6 trillion deficit this year and a $9.76 trillion ten-year deficit, you would think that an American president would ... more

… and what you’ll see is a red ink tsunami coming soon. Late on Friday afternoon, CBO came out with their analysis of the president’s budget where they found that the ten year deficit caused by the President’s spending plan will be $1.2 trillion higher than what the administration estimated.  According to CBO, Obama’s binge spending will result in a ten year deficit of $9.76 trillion.

But back in November, the White House pledged it would “pivot” its focus toward deficit reduction. Here’s what Politico reported on November 13, 2009:

President Barack Obama plans to announce in next year’s State of the Union address that he wants to focus extensively on cutting the federal deficit in 2010 … according to top aides involved in the planning.

So much for that “pivot.” Instead of dealing with what’s being described as “unsustainable” deficits that’s setting “runaway records,” Obama is still pushing his $2.5 trillion government-run health care plan that will bust the budget. As we ... more

After he failed to deliver on the unions’ top two priorities – passing card-check legislation and comfirming their anti-business NLRB nominee, SEIU lawyer Craig Becker – Obama may now be trying to pay back labor unions by appointing SEIU boss, Andy Stern, to the administration’s newly created debt commission. The question is this: why is Obama considering appointing a union boss to a commission tasked with lowering the deficit when that union boss is only interested in increasing government spending and expanding the number of (unionized) government workers?

As The Washington Post points out, the influence of labor unions in the public sector has led to unsustainable increases in state spending: 

The more pertinent claim against organized labor may be on the public-sector side, where unions put significant pressure on state budgets, particularly with pension obligations. A new study by the Pew Center on the States finds a $1 trillion gap between what the states have promised ... more