Spending cuts?? Are you insane?
Posted on 01/04/2013 2:54:54 AM PST by SueRae
The rout was complete, the retreat disorderly. President Obama got his tax hikes — naked of spending cuts — passed by the ostensibly Republican House of Representatives. After which, you might expect him to pivot to his self-proclaimed “principle” of fiscal “balance” by taking the lead on reducing spending. “Why,” asked The Post on the eve of the final fiscal-cliff agreement, “is the nation’s leader not embracing and then explaining the balanced reforms the nation needs?”
Because he has no interest in them. He’s a visionary, not an accountant. Sure, he’ll pretend to care about deficits, especially while running for reelection. But now that he’s past the post, he’s free to be himself — a committed big-government social democrat.
As he showed in his two speeches this week. After perfunctory nods to debt and spending reduction, he waxed enthusiastic about continued “investments” — i.e., spending — on education, research, roads and bridges, green energy, etc.
Having promised more government, he then promised more taxes — on “millionaires” and “companies with a lot of lobbyists,” of course. It was a bold affirmation of pre-Clintonian tax-and-spend liberalism.
Why not? He had just won Round 1: raising rates. Round 2 is to raise yet more tax revenue by eliminating deductions. After all, didn’t John Boehner offer him $800 billion of such loophole-closing revenuejust a few weeks ago?
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Return of the old Obama? Krauthammer and the A-hole Oreilly who kissed the ass of Obama for 4 years now tell us,Obama is really a left wing big spending Democrat! Excuse me so called experts,Most of whom Lambasted Rush Limbaugh years ago when he was the ONLY one who Proclaimed “I hope He fails”,where are the comments on How Rush was Right,or how about Glen Beck who has done an even better job of exposing The Marxist for who he “Really Was”,by laying out the entire Menagerie of Marxist Czars and their agenda,his shows were classic,The Putz Oreilly even had Beck on his show for his own comic relief,now who is left with his Private parts Hanging out?
These Pontificators love calling out the Cowards in Congress,at least they have an Excuse,they want to keep their lucrative Country Club Positions in Washington,where was Oreillys Courage? Krauthammer is good at stating the Obvious and always gives the Benefit of the Doubt,which Marxists like Obama Thrive on,the good Nature of Patriots before they stab them in the Back.
Beck and Rush Get Hammered because they are right on the Mark,To really get the low down those are the ones to listen too,Beck will be Launching his own cable channel soon. Oreilly and Krauthammer and their ilk will just be The First to the Slaughter,I prefer to go down fighting with those who are NOT afraid to speak out from the Beginning
Even Charles here doesn’t seem to face the fact that the direction we’re being taken is not sustainable. Myself and all the other makers don’t make enough to supply the ultimate vision of the president and his taker followers.
Spending cuts?? Are you insane?
We live in a center-left country now. Obama was completely sincere during the election and Americans wanted more government, more benefits and look to the state to take care of them from the cradle to grave.
Obama is as transformative and consequential a President as Ronald Reagan. The political coalition he created will last a generation.
In the face of this political climate, conservatives are fighting a losing battle.
You are 100% correct, Rush was right.
Good article by Krauthammer.
There are plenty of people who joined Obama in bashing Boehner...somehow making Boehner the face of evil....those people say they are conservative, but they miss the point that when they join Obama in attacking Boehner they’re writing campaign commercials for the liberals.
The Republicans and conservatives are Uncle Scrooge.
Its a political loser. Every one likes Santa - and even if you don’t like Obama, you’re happier with all those shiny presents under the Christmas tree.
That’s why he’s now being inaugurated this year for his second term.
Well said, sadly.
There is no way this ‘coalition’ will last a day with the money nearly gone and without Obama as leader.
The demographics have changed. Ronald Reagan couldn’t win today.
When the GOP has to write off New York and California every four years, its a growing national problem.
Its there and its not going to go away in our lifetime.
We DID go over the fiscal cliff, and taxes were then cut for all income groups except the top 1% of households. But payroll taxes will still increase for 77% of households (1), including many of his core constituent groups because of the payroll tax increase -- that nobody on either side of the aisle wanted to stop. Add in the reduced hours, layoffs and increased paycheck deductions because of Obamacare. Then consider that the price inflation resulting from monetizing the reckless spending and that COLA adjustments to transfer payments are made well after price inflation has taken place. Taxes of one kind or another are going up on practically everyone, and are going to most hurt the groups that Obama claims to want to help!
IMO we have a President who would be in over his head as a High School class President, and who doesn't have the depth of understanding about economic behavior of a cocaine dealer in the Chicago projects. Notwithstanding the Nobel Prizes, his advisers aren't any better. True, Obama has a "vision", but it's not just through rose-colored glasses, it's through the distortion of funhouse glasses. It's so disconnected from reality that it will fail.
(1.) "Analysis: 77% of Households to See Tax Increase"
PS. My recommendation: don't move to Chicago, or any big city! When Obamanomics hits the fan, deep blue urban areas will be Ground Zero!
The freeloaders have been the majority in New York and California for quite some time. Now, the freeloaders are the majority in the nation at large.
It’s over. The only alternative is resistance or exodus.
The best advice I have heard so far comes from (gasp) Newt Gingrich who has himself been down this road a couple of times before. His advice: stop negotiating and start legislating. Send bill after bill to the Senate with prudent and reasonable legislation contained therein and let the president and this Democrats in the Senate be reactive instead of slouching into a corner where Boehner and the Republicans are painted by the media be reactive.
Can you recall in the past two years any hearings except for the Fast and Furious scandal which as far as I can tell garnered Republicans no votes anywhere and Benghazi which was skillfully parried by the triple barriers of the Obama administration, the national media and Romney's fecklessness? Why have there not been hearings for two years in the house on spending, on the fiscal cliff, on the looming debt crisis? Why has the House of Representatives not been turned into an interrogation chamber? Gingrich cannot explain it either.
The predicate has never been laid for a successful opposition to Obama. We cannot expect talk radio to do the job of party functionaries, of Republican legislators, of Congressional Committee Chairman who should building hearings. We indignantly put all the blame on Boehner who, concededly, is the victim of his own ineptitude but that characteristic prevails everywhere in the Republican Party. One need only look at the Romney campaign with its comic opera technological failures on election eve to know how inept the Republican Party is across the board.
Gingrich suggests that Republicans start outside the Beltway and work across the country. He suggests that every Congressional Representative be responsible for conveying conservative message in his district and even in his state. We have Republican governors in abundance and Republican legislatures which we are not effectively employing. There is a failure of leadership and execution up and down and across the board.
Boehner should never have negotiated in private with the president, certainly he should not have done so without a condom, but he should never have permitted the party to slouch into this corner. He should have sent legislation up and made the media describe Obama's choice. Instead, he let Obama and the media define Boehner's dilemma. Under no circumstances should he had negotiated against himself, nor should have conceded tax increases from the beginning out of fear of the implications of Obama's election victory.
Romney should have run a more effective campaign. The Republican National Committee should have organized a bottom-up, grassroots movement in association with the Tea Party to combat the Democrats more advanced get out the vote system. To the degree that we conservatives are disillusioned with the Republican establishment for its ideological declensions, those feelings should be amplified geometrically with respect to its failure to execute a nuts and bolts operation to be expected of a national political party. Execution is not dependent on purity of ideology and these Rinos running the party are virtually exclusively responsible for this breakdown. Heads should roll.
Romney's peculiar history left his ideology unclear, probably muddled, which might (repeat "might") account for weak turnout among Republicans but the mechanics of the campaign were also so thoroughly muddled that it is difficult to understand whether it was incoherent ideology or mechanics or both which produced the debacle on election day.
I go through all of this because I feel that the last line of defense against Obama, the Republican House of Representatives, is about to be breached and broken. We were not united on the fiscal cliff vote and might not be united in the critical battle that must be waged over the debt ceiling. If we are in disarray at that critical moment there is nothing to stop Obama rolling on to total domination.
For God's sake let us not fight that battle disunited, without coherent strategy, with the public ignorant of the stakes, from a corner embattled.
The GOP could have won with a stronger candidate. I doubt even Obama could pull out a win with everything that has happened since election day. Younger people might want more socialism but until they are getting richer not poorer it just isn’t going to happen.
Maybe, maybe not. The country polls completely different on issues than they voted in 2012. The only real issue that polled well for Obama was to raise taxes on the rich and not the rest. This is human nature, and no one made an effective counter argument.
Your conclusion can be countered with the successful election of conservative governors in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey, and Michigan (more moderate republicans in the later two). These governors all won on decidedly conservative platforms just two years ago in the very states that went for Obama and dem senators just two years later. 2012 was a surprising outcome because it bucked every public trend of the previous three years. I am not convinced it was not the anomaly. The democrats simply ran a massively better campaign.
I think it goes way beyond Santa Claus, and I think Krauthammer takes far too benign a view of Obama, at least in the beginning of the article. Towards the end, he does bring up Obama’s class warfare rhetoric, but he’s still not going far enough.
Obama is a stupid, bitter man with a huge entitlement mentality himself; I think this is part of his sociopathic personality. But he is consciously carrying out not an agenda planned by him, but the 1960’s Marxist agenda of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who I think we would find to be the true intellectual authors of his program. They were two of the Weathermen, a group that used to greet each other by sticking out all four fingers to celebrate the way that Charles Manson stuck a fork in Sharon Tate’s stomach. Like all white radicals, they were wannabe blacks and regarded the Black Panthers as the vanguard of the supposed revolution. Obama himself is a wannabe American black, a possibly foreign born and certainly foreign raised child of an alienated white leftist hippie chick and her foreign, absent African baby daddy, who has spent his entire peivileged life trying to craft his image as a member of this supposedly revolutionary black ghetto underclass.
Everybody else around him is carrying out different parts of the hate America program, mostly by subverting the country in its dealings with foreign powers or terrorist groups. But the domestic agenda, which is based upon sheer irrational hatred and resentment, like any leftist revolution, comes from these two Weathermen. The fact that Obama used Ossawatomie as one of the places to kick off his campaign should have been headline news; the place was not only the scene of a labor action, but the name of the paper published by the Weathermen.
So while I entirely agree that Americans as a whole have become too fond, not only of Santa Claus, but of Holy Mother the State, I think there is much more behind this and much more ruthless manipulation of our system than we are willing to admit.
But that’s a good question: could Ayers et al. get away with this without Obama as a figurehead? He’s some one who probably doesn’t come up with any ideas of his own but whose hatred and frightening personal instability and sociopathic disregard of normal behavior are enough to carry out any program they devise, like any good dictator, and who, as Krauthammer pointed out, has now overcome the final institutional barrier to total power.
I think Obama personally, with his craziness, is essential to the program, and I don’t think it could continue without him. But we missed our chance to get rid of him, and I think this next term (which he may extend, or extend by having his wife run in 2016) is going to be very frightening indeed. It will be the full takeover by the Weathermen, victorious at last.
Good points all. It is very true that the GOP has relied upon talk radio to do the work that it should be doing as a party, and I think this is primarily because the GOP leadership is cowardly and doesn’t want to take the heat they would get from the entrenched leftist powers and the leftist media.
Gingrich is right: the House should be seething with resistance and should be asserting itself. Unfortunately, Boehner’s decision to “negotiate” independently with Obama contributed to the sense that the House is powerless and exists mainly for show, and I think this is one of the things that has allowed Obama to now regard the House as the final institutional threat that has now been neutralized.
I read that one of the conditions of boehner’s reelection was that he never again deal individually with Obama or the Dems, but let the normal legislative process take its course. Sadly, I think it may be too late for this; it would be wonderful if the House would take Gingrich’s wise advice and reclaim and reassert their powers, but I don’t see that happening.
I disagree with the idea that it won’t go away in our lifetime. We don’t produce enough exportable goods, or any goods for that matter in this country. Our money is soon to become virtually useless. You cannot continue to give what you don’t have. Other nations that produce our “cheap” products will soon want something other than useless paper for their goods.
I won’t speculate on exactly what WILL happen, although I do have a few ideas. But it will end soon. Within the next 2 to 4 years,and I hope my lifetime is a bit longer than that!:)
I’m usually a fan of Charles Krauthammer (OK, as much of a fan as I could possibly be of anyone who once wrote speeches for Walter Mondale!) and I think he’s somewhat off the mark here.
We DID go over the fiscal cliff, and taxes were then cut for all income groups except the top 1% of households. But payroll taxes will still increase for 77% of households (1), including many of his core constituent groups because of the payroll tax increase — that nobody on either side of the aisle wanted to stop. Add in the reduced hours, layoffs and increased paycheck deductions because of Obamacare. Then consider that the price inflation resulting from monetizing the reckless spending and that COLA adjustments to transfer payments are made well after price inflation has taken place. Taxes of one kind or another are going up on practically everyone, and are going to most hurt the groups that Obama claims to want to help!
IMO we have a President who would be in over his head as a High School class President, and who doesn’t have the depth of understanding about economic behavior of a cocaine dealer in the Chicago projects. Notwithstanding the Nobel Prizes, his advisers aren’t any better. True, Obama has a “vision”, but it’s not just through rose-colored glasses, it’s through the distortion of funhouse glasses. It’s so disconnected from reality that it will fail.
Excellent.
And who in the MSM, including Charles will bring up the quote “ not raise your
taxes one thin dime”
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