Deadbeatonomics: Obama stiffs Chicago for $1.74M

When Barack Obama won the presidential election, the DNC and the Obama campaign staged a massive party in Chicago’s Grant Park.  They wanted to emphasize that Hope and Change had finally come to America.  Instead, it looks as though they showed how they planned to deal with the mortgage crisis — by letting the bill go unpaid after the big party (via Michelle):

Chicago has yet to recoup the $1.74 million cost of President Obama’s victory celebration in Grant Park — despite a burgeoning $50.5 million budget shortfall that threatens more layoffs and union concessions.

“The Democratic National Committee has not yet paid us,” Peter Scales, a spokesman for the city’s Office of Budget and Management, said Thursday after questions from the Chicago Sun-Times. “We’re reaching out to them this week.”

Stacie Paxton, a spokeswoman for the Obama-controlled DNC, explained the reimbursement delay by saying, “We are still looking at various costs and bills.” She would not say whether parts of the bill are disputed.

This wasn’t the Hope and Change Mayor Daley promised:

In late October, Mayor Daley assured that the cash-flush Obama campaign would reimburse the city for every penny spent on the rally. “We have a financial crisis,” he said at the time. “The City of Chicago could not afford $2 million on this because we’re gonna be laying off people, cutting back. That [cost] would really be unfortunate. . . . It’s a huge cost to the City of Chicago.

“This is not a presidential visit. . . . This is a political event, and they’ve agreed to pay for all those services — all the expenses of that. … It’s costly, but they raised quite a bit of money. There’s no [shortage] of money in that campaign.”

Maybe it was the Sub-Prime Campaign?

It sounds a lot like Obama’s economic policies.  Spend the money now, and simply default when the bills come due.  How is this any different from Porkulus, or from Obama’s plan to have the government force banks to write off parts of mortgages by having judges set interest rates?  All of this gives the same message: spend it now, promise to pay it back, and then walk away.  It’s Deadbeatonomics, which is the simplest way to describe Obama’s entire economic approach.

In fact, I have the perfect theme song for the Obama administration:

I was good, I could talk
A mile a minute,
On this caffeine buzz I was on
We were really hummin’
We would talk every day for hours
We belong to the deadbeat club

– Deadbeat Club, B-52s

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