The Obama Administration announced yesterday that it will “donate” $40 million of your tax money to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to assist the Palestinians. A recent report commissioned by the European parliament disclosed that the UNRWA labor union had selected Hamas, the Palestinian terror group, to oversee UNRWA’s Gaza facilities. As a result, Canada announced recently that it would no longer fund the UN agency. We shouldn’t be funding them either. Not $1 of your money should go directly or indirectly to jihadist groups like Hamas. If Obama is looking for some money to apply to the gargantuan budget deficit, this $40 million is an easy place to start. But we know this decision won’t be reversed, because this president still thinks “peace” can be bought in the Middle East, and he is committed to a Palestinian State no matter what the costs.

This afternoon, the Senate Finance Committee voted 14-to-9 in favor of a massive healthcare “reform” plan sponsored by Senator Max Baucus (D-MT). Let me make a few observations. Every Democrat, along with Republican Olympia Snowe, voted for it. All the other Republicans voted against it.

In analyzing the Baucus bill, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) suggested that the plan would probably cost $830 billion and save the government about $80 billion over ten years. But the CBO looked at “conceptual language,” not the actual legislative language. In other words, the CBO didn’t see the real bill, and it admits that “those estimates are all subject to substantial uncertainty.” Evidently “substantial uncertainty” was good enough for 14 Senate liberals.

Now the real heavy lifting begins. The Baucus bill is just one of several plans approved by various committees. Neither the House nor the Senate has actually passed anything. This battle is not over. Democrats have a super majority, but there are deep divisions among them.

In March, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warned, “President Barack Obama’s budget would produce $9.3 trillion in deficits over the next decade, more than four times the deficits of Republican George W. Bush’s presidency.” That warning is already coming true. While Congress was debating ObamaCare, a new Big Government program expected to cost $1 trillion, the announcement came last week that the United States posted a record annual deficit of $1.4 trillion. To give you some perspective, the previous record deficit, recorded last year, was a “mere” $459 billion.

But, if things don’t change quickly in Washington, one budget analyst warns that it could get a lot worse than the CBO suggests. Brian M. Riedl of the Heritage Foundation says, “The White House figures are based on unrealistic estimates of discretionary spending, interest payments and interest rates.” According to Riedl, a more realistic analysis produces deficits “$4 trillion higher than recent estimates by the Obama administration and the Congressional Budget Office.” And if spending goes unchecked by future Congresses, the budget deficit could reach $2 trillion a year by 2019.

That kind of outrageous spending is unsustainable and will bankrupt America. But it helps to explain why liberal politicians are proposing a massive new energy tax, a value added tax, new surtaxes and excise taxes and more.

Laura Tyson, an economic advisor to President Obama, is suggesting that the nation needs a major economic stimulus plan devoted to infrastructure spending to help the anemic economy recover. No, you’re not having déjà vu; the administration is laying the ground work for Stimulus II. Believe it or not, Tyson says the $787 billion stimulus bill was “a bit too small.”

In addition to our budget deficit, Washington is also suffering from a serious trust deficit. The trillion-dollar stimulus bill (it’s real cost with interest) was sold to the nation as an infrastructure plan full of “shovel ready” projects. We were told that if it passed, unemployment would not go above 8%. Well, infrastructure projects accounted for only 11% of the $787 billion, and unemployment today is 9.5%.

The bill wasn’t what Democrats told us it would be, nor has it done what they promised it would do. But now they are demanding a “redo.” I don’t know about you, but I want a refund!