Barack Obama promised us hand-to-hand combat, and his speech yesterday was the start.
The nation is facing a debt crisis of historic proportions, but nothing will be done because Obama already has launched his presidential campaign. A compromise must included serious changes to unsustainable entitlements which are swamping the Treasury. Yet Obama took any significant changes off the table yesterday, by channeling Alan Grayson’s charge that Republicans want people to die quickly.
By contrast, Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the top 2% will not make a dent in the problem, even assuming the static analysis of $700 billion in additional revenue over 10 years. That 10-year number doesn’t even close the budget deficit for this year. And of course, life is not static, and the projected revenue does not take into account changes in behaviour to avoid taxes, what I’ve termed the revolt of the kulaks.
As The Wall Street Journal points out:
According to Internal Revenue Service data, the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 trillion. Even if all these Americans—most of whom are far from wealthy—were taxed at 100%, it wouldn’t cover Mr. Obama’s deficit for this year.
The truth is that Obama doesn’t care about the deficit. Obama proposed a budget not long ago which would have increased spending and the deficit. It was only after the recent showdown over last year’s budget that Obama decided that politically he needed to appear to be attentive.
Yesterday’s speech was a calculated move by someone who doesn’t care about the deficit to pretend to care so that he could use the issue in political hand-to-hand combat.
If you don’t think 2012 is the make-or-break political year for this country, then you haven’t been paying attention.
Update: Ramesh Pannuru does a good job debunking myths about the Ryan plan, and Jim Geraghty has a good post, Obama’s Habit of Trashing His Invited Guests.
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Obama and Soros want to crash the U.S. and replace its economic and political infrastructure with communism. Plain and simple. It will not happen.
Last man standing will be…
The linked Wall Street Journal editorial ends with this paragraph:
"Mr. Obama ludicrously claimed that Mr. Ryan favors 'a fundamentally different America than the one we've known throughout most of our history.' Nothing is likelier to bring that future about than the President's political indifference in the midst of a fiscal crisis."
Isn't this the point? Isn't it time we recognized that bringing about "a fundamentally different America" is and has been Obama's goal all along?
If unchecked US debt and spending is topped by more debt and spending, the resultant fiscal and monetary calamity would excuse a drastic Washington power grab, and added $-trillions of "emergency" welfare and security measures. Obama and his fellow Washington progressives would literally win by default. America would become the world's largest "social democracy."
How else can one interpret Obama's coveted "vision for America — a vision where we live within our means while still investing in our future; where everyone makes sacrifices but no one bears all the burden…?"
In Obama's America "investing in our future" means profligate federal government spending, and living "within our means" equates to paying for this spending by taxing the livings of Americans earned on "free markets" by means of "free enterprise," American institutions that Obama professes to have "faith in."
In Obama's warped world view failing to tax the last dollar of every successful American citizen is squandered federal government revenue, which equates to wasteful federal government spending!
This President is a Marxist collectivist who cannot imagine how American "rugged individualists" would educate their children or do scientific research or care for the sick or build schools, highways or railroads without federal government largesse. Without these federal government "commitments," he says, "America would not be a great country[!]."
This President proposes to solve America's spending and debt crisis by appointing "independent" federal government "commissions," and establishing a federal "debt failsafe," which is nothing more than a political escalator clause that will grant Washington politicos free rein to raise taxes to whatever level needed to feed Obama's new super Welfare State.
Yes, the political battle lines have been drawn for 2012, and folks, this will be a battle for our "vision" of the "American Dream" — the sacred principle of private property and free enterprise — as opposed to Obama's socialistic nightmare — a commune of "shared responsibility and shared sacrifice."
Game on!
Agreed. The 2012 elections are the last chance for our country. In addition to all that is written above, think what Obama will do to America on the international front if he is reelected. It is a chilling thought.
I count on trusted sites, such as Legal Insurrection, to identify important battles and opportunities to participate by contributing funds for those who are fighting, such as in the recent Wisconsin election.
So what is the first thing Obama did after one of the most offensive and insultingly ignorant and dishonest speeches ever given by a president? Hit the campaign trail. He told them that he may be pre-occupied with a few distractions in DC for a while but assured them that he will be hitting the campaign trail for real very soon. In the meantime, don't be shy. Send money.
ending the bush tax cuts would cut 3.3 trillion from the debt, about a quarter of it, according to the CBO.
If our debt crisis is as historic as you say shouldn't we take that one simple step that resolves so much of the problem?
And if you refuse to doesn't that say something about just how honest these claims of the importance of the debt are? If you won't roll back taxes to the levels of the 90s (remember when we had a surplus and not a deficit) then I have to question your sincerity about the matter at all.
@Tialoc – Obama doesn't propose ending all the Bush tax cuts, only those on the top 5%. Read the WSJ article linked, most of the benefit from the Bush tax cuts goes to the 95%, not the 5%.
@Tialoc: "If you won't roll back taxes to the levels of the 90s"
Deal! Here's my hand, I'll shake on it right now. You willing?
Oh…just one little thing first. I'm sure you just forgot to mention it. If we're going to raise taxes to 90s levels, that naturally we're going to roll back spending to 90s levels too, right? I mean, it's only logical, if we're going to go back to the 90s, than we should really go back to the 90s across the board, no?
I'll take that deal. You still want to?
*extends hand*
This speech was a rhetorically violent watershed in modern American politics and the GOP is reacting to it with dangerously aymmetrical complacency. For Ryan to say that he was"disappointed" is ridiculously inadequate. The time for clear language and confrontation is way overdue. The Right must engage this man on the terrain of the classic struggle between the individual and the State, not in the pecuniary islets of budgets and "deals." There are no "deals" to be made with this ideological militance.
The Boehners, Cantors and the GOP elite are useless to this moment. Who will step forward?
@Tialoc
You need to get your numbers straight.
The CBO did indeed project that extending the Bush tax cuts for 10 years would add approx. $3.3-trillion to the federal debt.
However, the CBO also projected that, based on Obama's fiscal 2011 budget, the federal public debt would be $20.3-trillion in 2020. That's 90% of CBO projected total US GDP in 2020.
It is pretty much universally accepted by economists that nations with a 90% or more publically-held debt to GDP ratio run into serious economic trouble.
Rest assured that such debt levels are "historic" for the US, excepting WWII levels:
"America’s debt-to-GDP ratio peaked at 109 percent at the end of World War II, while the ratio for economically troubled Greece hit 115 percent last year."
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/26/cbos-2020-vision-debt-will-rise-to-90-of-gdp/?page=1
Form your own opinion with regard to the "importance of the debt." One thing is for sure. US debt exists independently of yours, or mine or the Professor's opinion of it.
Perhaps, rather than the importance of debt, you ought to consider a more important question:
How important is private property relative to our nation's prosperity?
Geraghty: "I’m reminded of Saul Alinsky’s Third Rule: Wherever possible, go outside of the experience of your enemy."
Of course, standard military doctrine. But a fellow citizen is a military enemy? What's wrong with Alinsky's rules? Nothing. His bad is the who at whom he points them.
When a fellow walks into an ambush, who is to blame? When a fellow invites a panther into his home and becomes supper, who is to blame?
The guy works alternately as a dog in a pack running ambushes and a cat stalking and poaching. Who's to blame him? It's his nature. Why be upset? He is what he is, isn't he?
His marks walk into his and his tribe's ambushes and invite him to poach their rice bowls. Who's to blame for that? Besides, his pack is super-rich and integrated, comprising primarily stealthy females. Best hunting team these old eyes have seen. One has to admire them for what they are. Evil always fascinates the inquiring. And the pads on his feet are super soft, so he stalks in profound anonymity even while everyone hears and sees him doing it. What's not to marvel over?
He is what he does and does what he is, a perfectly integrated personality. If not admirable, at least remarkable. An archetype of his type. He even says and does it up front for all to hear and see, and all the time.
A scorpion is a scorpion, so designed. It cannot change its nature. It will do what it is.
Hire an evil man and your life becomes hell. Yet, it's always possible to hope it won't be, and that cloud castle warmly invites multitudes, showering them with rich hospitality.
Be a racist and a racist will jump down your throat and ream your guts out. Who is to blame for that?
How does one burnish dull intellects and motivate lazy bones, inspiring them to face facts and overwhelm liars?
Alinsky used jealousy, inciting envy, and that works proximately. It also incites confusion and push-back. His descendants continue using jealousy to conjure intellectuals and motivate the lazy. But having to get out in public exposes their internal contradictions to recognition and them to dismissal.
So there has to be a proper motivator of clean minds, pure hearts and skilled hands. It isn't politics. It has to be something natural in the sense of essential. "The rich and powerful" are of a fleeting composition. They are no more than anyone else is who makes life happen.
Tialoc: you are operating from the premise that everyone is a slave on the Copperhead collective plantation. No sale. Not ever.