If you haven’t had a chance to see it, I urge you to take the 3.5 minutes and watch the short speech by Daniel Hannan, a conservative MEP for South East England, during Gordon Brown´s visit to the European Parliament on March 24, 2009.

Maybe it is his British accent? Maybe it’s his crisp clear tenor void of any “ums or ahs” that reminds me that we don’t speak the Queen’s language? Or maybe it’s the message, one that seems to have caught fire and made his speech the #1 watched YouTube video in the UK. The answer is most likely all the above.
The power of his message and the choice of his words to convey this message were a work of art. If President Obama is the America’s current king of public speaking, then Britain has just found his equal. In fact, CNBC’s Neil Cavuto interviewed him the next day saying, “some are calling you the next Prime Minister of England.”

Hannan’s message can be summed up in one line of his speech, “you can’t spend your way out of recession, and you can’t borrow your way out of debt.” And this is where the Obama-Hannan similarity ends.
I supported President Obama when he called for an economic stimulus. I even supported the need to hasten its passage. But I was terribly disappointed with the lop-sided process and even more disgusted with the outcome. I don’t need to retread on the pros and cons of the trillion dollar stimulus package that was passed in February. To be fair to the President, anything that comes out of Congress that big is most likely to have some problems in it. But the fact that it only generates less than 20% of the money into the economy in the first 18 months doesn’t make it a stimulus. Instead, it’s a massive “inter-year” spending bill, with entitlements that only grow government in perpetuity. That’s not simulative.

On top of that, the White House drops at $3.9 trillion dollar budget one month later that calls for $1.75 trillion in deficit spending in 2009 with another $1.17 trillion in 2010. The White House says it’s for health-care, energy independence and education. That’s great. I think all of those are important and need to be reformed. But Congress just passed a trillion dollar spending bill, why double down? And more importantly, how are we going to pay for it?

This question is not only being asked by millions of ordinary taxpaying citizens, its being questions by leaders such as PM Merkel of Germany and Chinese PM Wen Jiabao. In fact, so concerned is China about the long term sustainability of America’s growing debt load, that People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan has called for the dollar to be replaced with a different standard run by the International Monetary Fund.

Hannan stated that every child born is Britain is born with a 20,000 pound note around his/her neck and that the interest of the debt alone will cost more it’s will to educate that child. If you think we are any different here in the US, think again. With $9 trillion in debt today, every man, women and child owes $30,000. According to the independent Congressional Budget Office, under the Obama budget forecast, the US debt will double in the next 10 years. The interest alone will reach $820 billion per year or $2,800 per year for every US citizen.

So what does the White House have to say to those that suggest we just can’t afford to spend like this? They say we need to spend money now in order to get growth in the future, which will bring in enough tax revenue to offset the spending increase.  Sounds great right? The problem is that the math doesn’t work. In order for the economy to grow enough to pay for a federal government envisioned by the White House that would be able to carry such a large debt burden, we would have to grow continuously for the next 10 years at an average pace of 4.7% per year [even under the White House’s rosy scenario, guess what, we still have an annual deficit of $712 Billion in 2019]. Does Obama really believe this is likely?

Mr. Hannan supported Obama, as did many foreign leaders. But slowly Obama’s support is deteriorating amongst leaders who are questioning his economic judgment. While Obama should not be blamed for the recession (that falls squarely on the Bush Administration and Congress), he is flying the “airplane” now, and he can’t make the same reckless mistakes that he derided Bush for over the past two years.

In his speech, Hannan pillories Brown’s statement that, “Britain is well positioned to weather the storm.” Hannan says that Brown is not only dishonest, because he knows that Britain is not well positioned, but on spewing this rhetoric Hannan says, “you sound like a Brezhnev era apparachick, giving the party line.”

If Obama continues his “party line” rhetoric about the fact that spending more money will mean more for all of us in the future, and all the time knowing that the facts can’t possibly back this up, I predict that he will lose one of the great opportunities to become a historically great President and leader. Instead, he will go down as a one term liberal with grand ideas and no substance.

Therefore, I urge the President, to consider what you promised. When you preached of personal responsibility and changing Washington, is this really what you meant? I thought you would show both sides of the aisle, what real responsibility meant. When you deride banks for giving to much credit card debt to consumers, where is the responsibility of the consumer not to ring-up those credit balances? Maybe it’s hard for you to preach what you can’t practice.

If you want to walk-the-walk, then talk-the-talk! Show Americans what fiscal responsibility really looks like. Show the world that the greatest corporation in the world, The United States Government, is being run properly. Otherwise, what makes you any different that all those CEO’s who blew up their companies and are being blamed for the economic mess?

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