Posted on 06/24/2011 4:14:03 PM PDT by Kaslin
The Democrats seem to have given up on budgets. Hey, who can blame them? They've got a ballpark figure: Let's raise $2 trillion in revenue every year, and then spend $4 trillion. That seems to work pretty well, so why get hung up on a lot of fine print?
Harry Reid says the Senate has no plans to produce a budget, but in April the president did give a speech about "a new budget framework" that he said would save $4 trillion over the next 12 years.
That would be 2023, if you're minded to take him seriously. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, did. Last week he asked Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, if he'd "estimated the budget impact of this framework".
"No, Mr. Chairman," replied Director Elmendorf, deadpan. "We don't estimate speeches. We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech."
"We don't estimate speeches": There's an epitaph to chisel on the tombstone of the republic. Unfortunately for those of us on the receiving end, giving speeches is what Obama does. Indeed, having no other accomplishments to his name (as Hillary Clinton pointed out), giving speeches is what got the president his job.
You remember — the stuff about "hope" and "change." Were the CBO in the business of "estimating speeches," they'd have run the numbers and concluded that under the Obama plan vague abstract nouns would be generating 87% of GDP by 2016.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
He nails Obama. Railroad spikes.....
Anytime I read any of his articles my brain does it with his voice and accent.
I love when he’s a fill in for Rush.
I love his accent
He sure does
Good article, but it hurts.
Yes, we got some con-man in the White House ... but the bottom line is that we are hosed. Unless you are part of the Government Class that gets a blank check in providing itself treats... But even then - at some point when the Economy has been completely throttled, they'll have nothing left to pay themselves.
"In Speechworld, "no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach." In Realworld, that's mainly because we're going downhill. And the horizon is a cliff edge."
Mark Steyn ping.
Freepmail me, if you would like on or off the Mark Steyn ping list.
Ping me
And they'll be the ones whose heads are on our pikes.
Me too. Also Stuart Varney. Ever hear him tell his story about how he got into business news instead of the “regular” news?
Because of his accent! Thank God for both of them!
He spends his time in “speech world” so his hands are never dirty.
I love everything about Mark as guest host except that mannerism of semi-stammering, semi-repeating parts of phrases, etc. The “Undocumented Host” schtick, with “no supporting paperwork” is a hoot.
He fails to have the clarity of strategic vision that led Norman Podhertz to call the Cold War "WW III" and the current war against Salafist Islam "WW IV".
We won a war in 1992 when the Soviet Union collapsed. The "lost wars" after WW II were not proper wars but campaigns in a larger war which we eventually won. It was admittedly an odd war, since nuclear deterrence caused it to be fought at arm's length: our proxies and the Soviets' proxies fought, we fought Soviet proxies directly, the Soviets fought our proxies directly, and the crucial blow was faked telemetry in our anti-missile tests that made us look about 10 years ahead of where we actually were. All the great military theorists of ages past from Sun Tzu to Clauswitz to Liddell-Hart would have beamed with delight at Reagan's accomplishment.
We will depart Iraq in the near future and we will leave behind a country where a threesome of American GIs cannot take a walk downtown to see the sights. If they did they’d be risking life and limb in a major, stupid kind of way.
The Iraqis hate the infidel and are committed to killing us.
They belive in a religion that insists on a dictator (caliph) and his cronies running their government.
What does that say for the future of Iraq?
Ditto the above for Afghanistan.
Why does Steyn not have his own full-time talk show. He is waaaaay better than Hannity.
Isn’t it the President’s job to produce a budget and Congress’ job to accept or reject it?
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