Westmoreland: In one year, Obama packs on the freshman trillion

On Jan. 20, 2009, President Obama took the oath of office as our 44th president amid unparalleled excitement about his promises for change. On Jan. 20, 2010, Americans are saying, “Keep the change.” What a difference a year makes, said U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland today.

“In a marriage, one year is the ‘paper anniversary’ where you exchange paper-based gifts,” Westmoreland said. “The paper the American people have received is more than $1 trillion in IOUs through deficit spending, and thousands and thousands of pages in big government legislation on energy, health care and the financial system.

“Americans, in fact, are saying loud and clear that they’re tired of these paper gifts after one year. That’s why Massachusetts voters cast their paper ballots yesterday to end the Democrats’ supermajority in the Senate.

“President Obama told us once that we’d remember his presidency as the moment ‘when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.’ Instead, our nation will remember this time as when our flood of debt became a tsunami of debt, when $800 billion in stimulus spending failed to stimulate, when Americans in search of work wondered how they were going to pay their families’ bills, and when even the most liberal state in the nation rejected a massive agenda of big government programs that our nation simply cannot afford.”