Swindle of the year

Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 - and House Democrats don't have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years - which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?

At great cost that will have to be paid after this newest free lunch, the package will add as much as 1 percent to GDP and lower the unemployment rate by about 1.5 percentage points. That could easily be the difference between victory and defeat in 2012.

Obama is no fool. While getting Republicans to boost his own reelection chances, he gets them to make a mockery of their newfound, second-chance, post-Bush, Tea-Party, this-time-we're-serious persona of debt-averse fiscal responsibility.

If Obama had asked for a second stimulus directly, he would have been laughed out of town. Stimulus I was so reviled that the Democrats banished the word from their lexicon throughout the 2010 campaign. And yet, despite a very weak post-election hand, Obama got the Republicans to offer to increase spending and cut taxes by $990 billion over two years. Two-thirds of that is above and beyond extension of the Bush tax cuts but includes such urgent national necessities as windmill subsidies.

No mean achievement. After all, these are the same Republicans who spent 2010 running on limited government and reducing debt. And this budget busting occurs less than a week after the president's deficit commission had supposedly signaled a new national consensus of austerity and frugality.

Yes. Stimulus per se is not a problem. The problem is whether the chosen “stimulus” effectively stimulates the economy!

Duh. Charles, we are all FOR stimulating the economy. Had Obambi proposed something that would actually work to stimulate the economy, we would have been all FOR it. But he didn’t. He threw money down Ratholes and simply called it “Stimulus.” That doesn’t cut it.

If, Charles, you are right that Obama has actually agreed, through extension of the Bush tax cuts, to a “Stimulus” that will effectively stimulate the economy, what in Hell’s Bells is the problem with that?

The Rats could care less about effectively stimulating the economy. They were for “Stimulus,” i.e. Porkulus, precisely because it was porkulus. It had nothing to do with whether or not it actually stimulated the economy.

The Rats are against (Charles’ term) the present “stimulus,” i.e. refusing to raise tax rates, precisely because they have absolute bloodlust for always, under every circumstance, RAISING TAXES. It has nothing to do with whether or not this actually will stimulate the economy.

You can’t blame Rats for not caring that Obambi, supposedly, got a “stimulus” package here. They DON’T care about stimulating the economy, period! They care about increasing government spending and increasing taxes, each of those as stand-alone goals and dreams.

No *we* aren’t.

I am for the government to get its fiscal house in order and leave us the hell alone. I don’t want to be taken care of by Democrats or Republicans.

I don’t need a tax cut or a spending incentive to do the best I can.

I do need the government to get its deficit down to 0.0 so that all I work for and all I plan to give my children isn;t made worthless in a government default.

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