GOP hypocritical about 2010 federal budget

President Obama's proposed 2011 budget is huge, at $3.8 trillion, but keep in mind that $2.4 trillion of that is mandatory spending on programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest on the national debt. The rest of the budget rightly focuses spending on job creation. Creating jobs must be priority No. 1 right now. Obama is trying his best to cope with the George Bush recession. It takes a lot of money and no small effort to prop up the sky once it has started to collapse.

Many Americans have such short or selective memories they actually want to believe that if only they brought back those fiscally conservative Republicans all would be well. The problem is, Republicans have shown they are not fiscally conservative at all. Bush and the Republican Congress mortgaged our children's future by going on a spending spree. They never met a pork-stuffed spending bill they didn't like. The Republican party ran up a huge deficit after being handed a budget surplus for the first time in modern history and proceeded to run the economy into the ground.

Now the GOP has suddenly flip-flopped, claiming to be the fiscal hawks they were incapable of being when they held the reigns of power. We'd be fools to trust them again.

Jerry Woodens

Cedar Rapids