Posted on 04/05/2013 12:03:59 AM PDT by neverdem
We can imagine what lies ahead in 2017 — no matter the result of either the 2014 midterm elections or the 2016 presidential contest.
There will be no more $1 trillion deficits. About $10 trillion will have been added to the national debt during the Obama administration, on top of the more than $4 trillion from the eight-year George W. Bush administration. That staggering sum will force the next president to be a deficit hawk, both fiscally and politically.
In addition, there will be no huge new federal spending programs — no third or fourth stimulus, no vast new entitlements. The debt is so large and voters are so tired of massive borrowing that the next president will talk not of “investments” but of balancing the budget. In 2017, President Hillary Clinton or President Marco Rubio will tell us that cutting spending and living within our means is the new cool.
If eight years of borrowing, printing, spending, and lending vast sums of money at zero interest did not lead to economic recovery, then the antithesis of all that will be the explicit platform of Republicans and the implicit one of Democrats.
Obamacare may remain in name, but in fact most of its provisions will be discarded or amended. Its full implementation next year will result in almost everything that was not supposed to happen: higher health-care premiums, rationed care, scarcer doctors, and fewer jobs. Obamacare will mostly go the way of the Defense of Marriage Act — officially the law of the land, but its enforcement simply ignored by the powers that be.
Despite an increase in carbon emissions since 2000, the planet did not heat up in the last 15 years. Scientists will continue to argue over global warming, but politicians will not talk much more of implementing costly cap-and-trade policies. They will still praise green energy as the way of the future, but they will not continue the massive subsidies needed to substitute it for far cheaper fossil fuels.
Instead, expect a renewal of federal oil and natural-gas leases on public lands. There is too much newly discovered recoverable energy on federal property to continue to delay its full production — and too much of an upside in cheaper gas at the pump, more independence from Middle East autocracies, more jobs, more money, and more economic growth.
Do not expect the same level of increases in disability and unemployment insurance and food stamps. The trajectories of all those programs since 2009 are not sustainable. For all the talk that Social Security and Medicare are not in bad shape, Democrats and Republicans after Obama will be forced to save both programs by either upping the eligibility age, curbing some benefits, or hiking payroll taxes — or all that and more.
The next president will jettison the sort of class warfare that has led only to short-term political gain and long-term polarization. Obama’s “fat cats” and “one percenters” will disappear from the presidential vocabulary. We will hear no more accusations that the successful really did not build their own businesses, or that they should have known when it was time not to profit because they had made quite enough money. Expect just the opposite: a Bill Clinton-like schmoozing of small businesses, asking them to please start buying, hiring, and expanding again.
Aside from the partisan furor over whether the Obama policies have worked — Democrats will say that things would have been worse without them; Republicans will insist that a natural recovery was turned into long-term doldrums — we will not see them continued.
We are institutionalizing, in European style, huge government, high unemployment, sluggish GDP growth, serial annual deficits, ballooning aggregate national debt, and massive dependency, along with near-zero interest rates. The two parties will disagree over the contours of this chronically weak economy, but not over the fact of its weakness — or, soon, even its causes. Most Americans will not wish to continue down the road to Italy or Spain.
Barack Obama is a landmark figure: young, charismatic, seemingly post-national, and supposedly post-racial. For those reasons alone, he enjoys a level of unshakeable political support not predicated on the actual record of his tenure as president (just as most remember fondly that he won the Nobel Prize but don’t quite know what he did to earn it).
Obama’s economic record will be dispassionately acknowledged to be similar to that of Jimmy Carter. But, unlike Carter, Obama will remain a mythical figure in liberal circles.
To borrow a line from a classic Western, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” And so we will do just that.
– NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals will appear in May from Bloomsbury Books. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Republicans need to abandon selling out America.
We need to bring back US production, and build things in the USA.
Right now.
You're a joke, right? You are aware that after signing the most massive tax hike in history and losing the House for the rats in 1994, the Republicans dictated "the budget". Clinton was left with little to do but chase young interns and masturbate in the Oval Office sink. I prefer George Bush getting those massive tax CUTS in his first year to anything the toon did.
And if you truly believe that you "don’t see why a Democrat couldn’t be good on the budget", then you must have got your hands on some pretty high-quality LSD. Rats don't do budgets without massive tax hikes as their centerpiece.
FRegards,
LH
(Wait... did you forget a /sarc tag?)
How would politicians do that? (Serious question.)
The electorate has elected and reelected the most left-wing radical president this country has ever seen. All bets are off.
We need some sort of domestic production-favoring tax code.
Our domestic production was once the wonder of the world. For the last two decades it has almost all, been sent lock stock and barrel overseas.
Now all that remains in America, is the finished package which was trucked in from the ship, from China.
Everything now is made in China.
Bring it back.
Now.
Funny how those same Republicans dictated a different budget to W, then.
All I know is that federal spending under Clinton reached its lowest levels in 50 years. The budget was in its best shape in a very long time. Was it all him? No. But he has to get some credit.
I preferred Clinton’s 18% spending levels to W’s 22% and doubling of the national debt, but that’s just me.
I’m just saying that party affiliation is no guarantee of anything. A Republican can be bad on the budgte, a democrat can be good. It really depends on the person.
(recognizing I did not completely answer your question)
I deliberately left open a lot of leeway in my answer, because that is where one can easily get in a great deal of trouble very quickly.
Let me just leave it, advocating some sort of domestic production-favoring tax code.
:D
Mostly trying to create the basic desire for American products once again, first.
Tough to do. The inertia of BIG BROTHER GOVERNMENT has enough support from the gullible to stall out any animal spirits left in the market.
BTW, why do the gullible have a very low opinion of Federal Politicians, but a very high opinion of the Federal Government?
Seems to me, weakest link in the chain defines the strength of the chain - - - and all that. What say you?
I only say one thing:
We will have either full employment, or we will have an ever-growing mess.
I do not want a mess. I want a responsible, smaller government.
So I say fix this. Other reasonable people disagree.
I understand but cannot support that view.
Bring back US jobs from overseas. Now.
The key is to make manufacturing in the United States a profitable venture. The things that hamper profitability are: over-regulation (including primarily the EPA), and labor costs. Ironically, there IS a lot of manufacturing going on in the US - - by Japanese and other foreign car makers. Those companies simply find friendly states to do business in.
I agree that tax policy can certainly help, as well, as long as it involves tax BREAKS.
The main thing is that everyday Americans don’t end up paying more for everyday products because they have to support the scumbag government and the greedy union pinky rings. That would simply amount to a “tax hike” on everyday Americans.
By the way, I do shop at Walmart for the prices.
FRegards,
LH
Why? All that scumbag did was shut down the government several times over budget cuts.
I preferred Clinton’s 18% spending levels to W’s 22% and doubling of the national debt, but that’s just me.
Although I agree those last couple of years of Pelosi and the communists were a killer, there was also the fact that Bush was the guy who came along and had the guts to face down the terrorists after Clinton watched them bomb a 30-foot crater under the World Trade Center and did nothing. An attack on America that took 3,000 lives and a couple of foreign wars can cost a lot of money.
When legit the government is admirable but by all appearances it has been pulling away from somewhat honorable to almost totally corrupt.
I fully suspect the last presidential election was fraudulent to such a degree that we may never have an honest election again.
I our Liberty is in Law. than as a lawyer, write to us what “The Law” should be doing about the weekly violations to the US Constitution by Barry Soetoro, (a legal resident of Indonesia), aka B. Hussein Obama.
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