Category: Budget

Necessary But Not Sufficient

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by Smitty (h/t Insty)

I don’t disagree with the mighty Scott Ott’s practical approach to a deficit deal, insofar as reality affects the thinking of the current POTUS, which is somewhere around ‘not at all’. Framing the discussion in terms of increasing revenue is both valid, and in keeping with Ott’s gentle humor.

Past the friendly cajoling, though, there is this: you have to tell me what we’re doing to re-constrain the federal government to its enumerated powers, or you haven’t told me much.

Restated, the outcome of our current series of Constituiontal crises is that we are either returning to the existing Constitution, as amended, and with respect to technological improvements like the Air Force that fall within the spirit of the document, or we just need to scuttle the flipping document entirely, and embrace the European suck.

There is some room for moderation, where something akin to Ryan’s plan may be more politically attainable, for the decades it will take for the Progressive-era herd to die off (sorry, mom & dad), but we have to cut the nonsense on the false EUtopia pushed by the Progressives. If it’s not a bridge to a Federalist, properly Constitutional, limited government, then any transition plan or compromise is an invitation to continued Progressdecay.

Stick to your guns, Boehner.

Old and Busted: Sippin’ Slurpees
New and Hot: Corporate Jets

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When President Obama accused Republicans of wanting to “compromise your kids’ safety so some corporate-jet owner can get a tax break,” Lachlan Markay of the Heritage Foundation pointed out that Obama’s massive 2009 stimulus included tax breaks for — wait for it — corporate jet owners. So the president was condemning Republicans for supporting his own policy.

This caused the White House and Media Matters to shriek that Heritage was just makin’ up stuff, but the facts are right there in a February 2009 Associated Press story.

So then the White House and Media Matters changed their claim: The Very Bad Tax Breaks the president was condemning were actually not the ones he’d signed into law, but some other tax breaks for which they could blame Republicans. All in all, it was a carnival of errors for the Left, and Mike Gonzalez at the Heritage Foundation was in the Gloat Zone last night:

We appreciate that folks at the White House are not having a good day. It started when a liberal commentator on their favorite network called the President a vulgarity, and it has not gotten better. The debt ceiling speech that liberal pundit Chris Matthews fantasized would turn the president into “Give ‘Em Hell, Barry” (Matthews’ words, not ours) has not exactly set the world on fire. Unemployment is still 9.1%, we are no closer to a deal to cut spending and pollster Rasmussen announced that only 21% of Americans strongly approve of the president’s performance, against 39% who strongly disapprove.
So what do you do if you’re a White House communicator? Well, you go after The Heritage Foundation, of course! Hopefully America will be distracted from economic incompetence.

What’s interesting to me in the whole fracas is this: Obama’s line about tax breaks for corporate jets wasn’t just something he improvised on the spur of the moment. He mentioned it six times during his press conference, so it was obviously a pre-planned talking point that his handlers had scripted. And as Rush Limbaugh said yesterday, “That’s all Obama’s got. All he has is class warfare.”

Evidently, the White House was planning to use this tax-breaks-for-corporate-jets line as their Secret Weapon to win the debate over the debt ceiling, and when it backfired on them, they had no Plan B, so they spent an entire day trying to salvage it.

It’s like that stupid car-in-the-ditch-and-Republicans-sipping-Slurpees line that Obama kept using during the mid-term election campaign. He kept saying it over and over again, like some kind of magic incantation, and what was the result? Republican landslide.


Obama Must Be Defeated

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Republicans in Congress cannot negotiate with or compromise with a president who talks like this:

“I’ve said to Republican leaders, ‘You go talk to your constituents and ask them, “Are you willing to compromise your kids’ safety so some corporate-jet owner can get a tax break?” ‘ “

This kind of hateful divisive rhetoric renders impossible any thought that Barack Obama is someone Republicans can “work with.” There can be no political peace on any terms with someone who thinks in such categories.

He must be defeated. Period.

‘Revenue Raises’? ‘Closing Loopholes’? Democrat Want to RAISE TAXES!

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“The fact of the matter is, we have on the table all kinds of revenue raises that they keep calling tax increases. How do you call closing loopholes to oil companies that are making billions of dollars in profits, closing up these loopholes that would generate $40 to $50 billion in revenue, how do you call that a tax hike? That is no tax hike. You only hike taxes when you raise rates. We are not asking anybody to raise anybody’s rates. We want us to have an effective tax collection and close these loopholes, stop giving billions of dollars in breaks to millionaires and billionaires.”
— Rep. James Clyburn, South Carolina Democrat

When I heard this Sunday morning on “This Week,” I was amazed. Under no circumstance will any Democrat ever agree to any meaningful cut to any federal spending program. And so their only answer to budget issues is always: Raise taxes.

Yet they are now trying to finesse the rhetoric, so that tax increases aren’t really tax increases. No, it’s “revenue raises” and “closing loopholes” — as if Americans are too stupid to understand that, call it what you will, Democrats are still the party of tax-and-spend.

PREVIOUSLY:

Renee Ellmers vs. Tim Geithner

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Rep. Renee Ellmers of North Carolina was one of the Tea Party’s favorite candidates from last year’s mid-term campaign:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who has his own issues with paying taxes, explained to Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) why taxes must be raised on small businesses to keep the federal government from shrinking. So what if spending went up by about a trillion bucks a year since President Obama took office.

When Ellmers finally told Geithner that “the point is we need jobs,” he responded that the administration felt it had “no alternative” but to raise taxes on small businesses because otherwise “you have to shrink the overall size of government programs” — including federal education spending.
“We’re not doing it because we want to do it, we’re doing it because we see no alternative to a balanced approach to reduce our fiscal deficits,” said Geithner.

“Balanced approach” has become a talking point for Democrats, obviously having been focus-grouped as a politically acceptable synonym for higher taxes:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi isn’t impressed with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s decision to suddenly bail on the White House deficit talks this morning, citing his disagreement with Democrats’ positions.
“Yes, we do want to remove tax subsidies for big oil, we want to remove tax breaks for corporations that send jobs overseas, that list goes on,” she told reporters in the Capitol on Thursday. “I don’t know that’s a reason to walk away from the table when we’re trying to find a balanced approach.”

Notice that Pelosi isn’t engaged in a serious policy discussion, but is merely recycling DCCC campaign rhetoric about “tax breaks for corporations that send jobs overseas.” It didn’t work in 2010, but Democrats are going to keep repeating it — and reporters will keep quoting it — until people start believing it.

Biden Debt-Ceiling Talks Collapse as Republicans Cantor, Kyl Walk Out

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Several weeks of Potemkin “bipartisanship” go down the drain as Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats refused to agree to any debt-ceiling deal that didn’t include tax increases. Jon Kyl has not yet issued a statement, but Eric Cantor explains his exit:

[A]s it stands the Democrats continue to insist that any deal must include tax increases. There is not support in the House for a tax increase, and I don’t believe now is the time to raise taxes in light of our current economic situation. Regardless of the progress that has been made, the tax issue must be resolved before discussions can continue. Given this impasse, I will not be participating in today’s meeting and I believe it is time for the President to speak clearly and resolve the tax issue.

Let me explain what’s actually happening here: John Boehner and the GOP call the shots in the House — where it’s straight majority rule — but neither party can exercise such unilateral power in the Senate, where Democrats don’t have a veto-proof majority. Therefore, the White House would normally be expected to act as broker for a deal acceptable to both parties in Congress. However . . .

Obama’s gearing up his 2012 re-election campaign, and is therefore trying to paint Republicans into a box, to depict them as “extremist” and “irresponsible” if they don’t compromise with Democrats on a deal to increase the debt ceiling. And in this case, “compromise” means agreeing to a tax increase, which would be a 100% betrayal of the voters who gave Republicans the majority in last year’s mid-term election.

In other words, it’s a variation of the tactic by which Democrats in 1990 forced George H.W. Bush to agree to a tax increase, breaking his “no new taxes” pledge. And if Republicans let themselves be bamboozled that way now, they deserve to be defeated in 2012.

Please Remind Me: Why Was It So Important to Elect Scott Brown?

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You guys remember how fired up conservatives were in January 2010, right? I’ve been scratching my head lately:

Senate Democrats forced a vote Wednesday on the controversial fiscal plan drafted by House Budget chief Paul Ryan, splitting the Republican caucus . . .
Moderate Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine were joined by Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in breaking with Republican leaders to oppose the Ryan plan.
Snowe and Brown are up for re-election in 2012.
Tea Party-backed Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky also voted against the budget, saying its proposed spending cuts are not deep enough.
All Senate Democrats voted no.
The final tally was 40-57. Fifty-one yeas would have been necessary to move the plan forward.

Da Tech Guy wonders if Brown thinks he can win re-election by appeasing liberals.

UPDATE: More news from Michael O’Brian at The Hill. Now a thread at Memeorandum.

Rhetorical Question Day at The Corner

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by Smitty

Steven Hayward and Jonah Golberg have questions, and I have answers.

Hayward quotes Kinsley, emphasis mine:

If the deficit doesn’t matter, why have any taxes at all? And if there is some point at which the deficit does start to matter, and become dangerous, when is that point if $1.6 trillion isn’t it?

Three reasons, for starters:

  1. Behavior shaping. Individuals may or may not have freewill, but the population as a whole gets mighty sheepish. For example, Washington can bait a lot of people into electric cars, then turn around and tax them. Brilliant!
  2. Class warfare. The assumption of eminent domain over every American wallet is a fantastic divide-and-conquer tool. The poor get a kickback every spring from the Treasury, the rich can be conveniently demonized for not paying that ‘fair share’, and the middle class feels nutty there in the nutcracker.
  3. ‘Job’ growth through complexity. The less intelligible the tax code, the more staff required at all levels to manage it, and the more secondary opportunity there is. Before Gutenberg, literacy was a full-time job. The tax wonk is the modern scribe. Who says Progressives are not conservative, after their sick fashion. If the IRS added to the economy, instead of taking, it would be such a Good Thing.

Goldberg is right behind Hayward, again, my emphasis:

Why have a debt limit at all? I mean, if it should automatically be raised the second you reach it without precondition, isn’t it a purely arbitrary and fictional barrier? I tried to make this point last night on Special Report, and it came out a bit clumsy, in part because I used the mathematically rigorous term “kuh-trillion.”

Jonah is playing coy about this. He knows that we need to have political theater. Theater is a bi-partisan device whereby the Ruling Class Overlords generate a vast hue and cry and demand we move in a sane direction, then go the opposite way.
The federal government has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted and is incapable of internal reform. You don’t have a choice, Tea Parties: you’ve got to continue to pressure incumbents, vote them out, demand change, and take the required haircut like an adult.

Fiscal boot camp ain't no frickin' beauty contest, mister.

If you’re still too peppy after all that, then step over to Piece of Work in Progress for a hit of financial gloom from Meep. Truly, our government is a sucking wallet wound.
Now, it would be an ill thing to go with such an entirely down post, so let me finish on a Rule 5 note, with Stacy’s patron Twitter saint:

Now, don't you feel better already?