Obama’s pretend budget cuts: Spending is the lifeblood of the president’s party

The Washington Times ^ | April 11, 2011 | Tony Blankley

[Scanian]

The great American engine of democracy is beginning to build up a head of steam, and it remains the finest device created by man to organize collective human action.

Two months ago, the conventional wisdom held that Washington would do nothing of consequence to start dealing with our fiscal crisis. Certainly that was the political base line for President Obama’s Feb. 14 budget proposal for 2012, which, while roundly condemned as a call to inaction, was seen as politically “shrewd.”

Then, about a month ago, the Republican-led House of Representatives passed $61 billion in budget cuts for the remainder of the 2011 budget - as the Democratic Party-controlled Congress had failed to pass any budget while in the majority last year.

That action produced a new conventional wisdom - that the GOP effort to make some cuts in the 2011 budget would lead to “civil war” between GOP leadership and the Tea Party faction - and risked condemnation from the public for implicitly threatening to shut down the government.

Then last week, GOP Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan produced a proposed budget for 2012 that would reorganize and trim Medicare and Medicaid programs, otherwise bring federal spending back to its historic level of 20 percent of gross domestic product, reduce tax rates and loopholes (while keeping revenue neutral) and bring the budget into balance by 2040.

This both assured most Tea Party freshmen that the GOP leadership was serious about deficit reduction and brought out the predictable Democratic Party response: The GOP wanted to cause cancer in women, “kill” women and the elderly and generally impose barbaric morals on a helpless public. Then conventional wisdom declaimed that Mr. Ryan was an honorable idealist, but he was leading the GOP to political suicide.

[Jack Hammer]

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

[wiggen]

“Well, no president who is confident of re-election chooses to embarrass himself by so conspicuously reversing himself on the central domestic issue of his time within two months unless he fears a new mood among the voters.”
I wish i believed that the ‘public’ even noticed his flip flop. Sure a segment does but the dems count on indifference,stupidity and self interest to be elected and we have little evidence that has changed.

[Jerrybob]

Pretend President's Pretend Budget Cuts.

There.