“We can’t posture and bicker and resort to the same failed ideas that got us into this mess in the first place,” President Barack Obama told a manufactured “town hall” style crowd in Elkhart, Indiana on February 9. But Obama’s policies and methods of selling those policies have been revealed to be precisely the same as the Bush policies that, as Obama reiterated at his press conference that same day, “got us into this mess in the first place."

Obama’s plan includes a hodge-podge of spending increases and tax cuts. But that’s just what President Bush and a compliant Congress did for eight years, resulting in a record budget deficit and a crashing economy. If Barack Obama promises not to do “more of the same,” why is that precisely what he is pushing?

The policies that got us into this mess in the first place were a series of tax cuts and spending increases that increased the budget deficit, combined with the Federal Reserve Bank keeping interest rates artificially low over a period of a dozen years. Yet the president’s “stimulus” bill is nothing more than a hodge-podge of spending increases and tax cuts  that all acknowledge will increase the budget deficit to nearly $2 trillion.

Obama acknowledged that the policies of the Republican Party involved too much spending and tax cuts by noting in his press conference that “it's a little hard for me to take criticism from folks about this recovery package after they've presided over a doubling of the national debt. I'm not sure they have a lot of credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility.”

So if the problem was created by deficit spending, why is the solution to the crisis to quadruple the annual federal deficit over next year?

Moreover, President Obama’s methods of selling the “deficit stimulus” bill (the deficit is all it would stimulate) are precisely the same as those used by President Bush. Bush pushed the last “stimulus” package — universally regarded as wasteful and ineffective — using the tactics of issuing dire threats of “financial panic” and haste. Now, Obama is using the same kind of dire threats to sell his package. Obama warned of “catastrophe” and a threat “as dire as any since the Great Depression” in his press conference and even said at his Elkhart traveling show that “at some point we may be unable to reverse” the deepening depression.

Obama is also using haste to sell the deficit stimulus package, telling people in Elkhart that “we've had a good debate. Now is the time to act. That's why I'm calling on Congress to pass this bill immediately.” But the bill hadn’t even been hammered out until Sunday, Feb. 8. How is it that by Monday morning “we’ve had a debate”? The bill hasn’t even been printed, or for that matter, read, by any congressman yet. Why can’t we read this bill?

The last “stimulus” bill did nothing but waste money and spike the deficit, in part because it hadn’t been read by any congressman before it was passed and made law. Must we follow the “same failed ideas that got us into this mess in the first place”?

President Obama said in his press conference that “we can no longer afford to wait and see and hope for the best” and that “delay or paralysis in Washington in the face of this crisis will only bring deepening disaster.” But if we continue to do the same things that got us into trouble in the first place, how does passing the deficit stimulus bill make it better than doing nothing?

In fact, the deficit stimulus bill will choke off any possible recovery because it will draw an expected $2.5 trillion out of capital markets this year (between the almost $2 trillion deficit needed for new borrowing and the amount needed to service existing debt). For an economy that’s only $14.26 trillion, that’s a lot of capital sucked out of the market. That fact alone may crush the lending markets and new business growth.

President Obama also said the following at his press conference: "You didn’t send us to Washington because you were hoping for more of the same. You sent us there with a mandate for change, and the expectation that we would act quickly and boldly to carry it out — and that is exactly what I intend to do as President of the United States."

But his actions tell us that we should read the same statement with an ellipse: "You didn’t send us to Washington because you were hoping for more of the same.... That is exactly what I intend to do as President of the United States."