Can You Trust Obama on the Economy?

Throughout the 2008 campaign, presidential candidate Barack Obama repeatedly stated his intent to save taxpayers’ money:

As President, I will go through the federal budget, line-by-line, ending programs that we don’t need and making the ones we do need work better and cost less.

On November 25, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama released this statement:

We cannot sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness, or exist solely because of the power of a politician, lobbyist, or interest group. We simply cannot afford it…

We will go through our federal budget -– page by page, line by line –- eliminating those programs we don't need, and insisting that those we do operate in a sensible cost-effective way.

Now, President Barack Obama is trying to push through Congress an $825 billion economic stimulus bill. Here is just a sampling of what the President evidently believes is "a sensible cost-effective way" to stimulate the economy.

$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts

$400 million to NASA for global warming research

$2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects

$335 million for STD education and prevention

$87 billion to help with states' Medicaid costs, including birth control costs

$600 million for alternative fuel vehicles for the General Services Administration

$44 million for repairs at the Agriculture Department headquarters

$6.7 billion to improve energy efficiency at federal buildings

$150 million for infrastructure repairs at the Smithsonian

$1.8 billion to repair National Park Service facilities

$200 million to rehabilitate the National Mall

There's no political agenda or special interest projects in this bill, is there?