Category: Budget

Obama Makes Token Gesture, Because He’s Losing the Shutdown P.R. War

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He’s trying to look reasonable:

President Barack Obama invited congressional leaders from both parties to the White House on Wednesday to discuss the partial government shutdown and looming debt-limit crisis, a White House official said.

There has been a tremendous backfire from Tuesday’s attempt — ordered by Obama administration officials for propaganda purposes — to block veterans from visiting the World War II Memorial in Washington. If you’ve been to that Memorial (which I visited with my family last summer), you know it’s an open-air site. No staff is required to make it possible for visitors to see the Memorial, and it took more manpower to put barricades around it than it would have to leave it open, from which anyone with common sense can see that the attempt to “close” the Memorial was purely as a publicity stunt.

Democrats are publicly explaining their shutdown strategy in terms of political “leverage.” While the mainstream media keep parroting the Democrats’ message (the partisanship at CNN these days is as shamelessly one-sided as MSNBC), ultimately the Big Lie will fail.

Read more at Power Line, The Right Scoop, Twitchy, National Review, Instapundit, Conservatives4Palin, PJ Tatler and Legal Insurrection.

 

It’s a Good Thing @GabrielMalor Isn’t Trying to Win Any Popularity Contests

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The morning Open Thread at AOSHQ gives their resident Eeyore a chance to voice his dissent from the GOP shutdown strategy:

So the score is: conservatives didn’t manage to stop Obamacare. Conservatives are oddly celebrating a shutdown they claimed they did not want. The GOP is getting blamed. Oh, and how are voters looking at this? A new Quinnipiac poll out this morning finds voters opposed 72%–22% to Congress shutting down the fed govt to block implementation of Obamacare.
Brilliant work. And, of course, we still have the eventual GOP surrender to look forward to, wherein the ultimate pointlessness of this strategy is revealed for all to see.

Lots of savage RINO-bashing from the commenters, which is fine and dandy. We don’t necessarily have to be waving our pompoms and doing backflips in celebration of the “Don’t Fund It” strategy. Nobody ever asked me for my advice on this, and if I had volunteered my advice, they would have ignored me, so I try to avoid the tempting illusion that anyone is going to be persuaded by my strategic advice or strategic criticism. “The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on.”

My bedtime reading recently has been The World Crisis, Winston Churchill’s 1,400-page history of World War I, which is not just a history but a memoir, given Churchill’s key role at the Admiralty, and subsequently in the Ministry of Munitions. This is the third or fourth time I’ve read The World Crisis, as it is my habit to re-read old books I like, because it is good to be reminded of excellent stuff you’ve forgotten since the last time you read it, and this time I found myself fascinated (again) by Part III, Chapter II, “The Blood Test.”

Here, Sir Winston examines the bloody folly of the “attrition” argument that was used to justify a series of murderous Allied offensives on the Western Front from 1915 through 1917. Churchill undertakes this survey after chronicling the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, for which Churchill was widely (and unfairly) blamed.

The strategic purpose of the Gallipoli invasion had been to support a British naval effort to force their way through the Dardanelles and to knock Turkey out of the war. The fall of Constantinople would have tipped the Balkans toward the Allies, and would have relieved pressure on Russia’s southern front. If the Dardanelles campaign had succeeded (as it quite nearly did, and might still have succeeded even after the initial setbacks, if only its importance had been more widely appreciated), the endless slaughter on the Western Front could have been averted, an Allied victory in the East may have forced the Central Powers to negotiate an early peace and . . .

Well, that’s all a gigantic “what-if” scenario, because instead the Allies gave up on the Dardanelles after the Gallipoli disaster, and concentrated instead on trying futilely to score a breakthrough on the Western Front. British commanders told themselves that their offensives of 1915-1917, which never broke and only slightly penetrated the German line at the cost of many thousands of British lives, were successful because of “attrition.” Yet Churchill said at the time (in a memorandum circulated during the Somme offensive of 1916) and demonstrated conclusively after the war, when both German and Allied manpower and casualty figures were available, that the British lost nearly 3-to-1 in casualties during their attacks. German casualties 1915-1917 were never greater than the number of new recruits they added to their forces, so that the “attrition” actually worked the opposite way, weakening the British armies in comparison to the Germans, who grew steadily stronger.

It was only in 1918, when the Germans mounted their own overwhelming offensive — attempting to defeat the Allies before the addition of U.S. troop strength could tilt the balance of the war — that the “attrition” worked in favor of the Allies. Ironically, then, it was the German offensive that ultimately defeated Germany.

Only after the German army had exhausted itself on the attack and the Allies then counterattacked (employing a powerful new weapon, the tank, in whose development Churchill played a key role), did the tide on the Western Front turn decisively against Germany.

All of this is evident in hindsight, but Churchill saw it with foresight. Yet his warnings about the futility of the Allied offensive strategy, and the wrongness of the “attrition” argument that justified that strategy, fell on deaf ears at the time. Churchill was absolutely right, but the truth was unpopular, and so hundreds of thousands of British troops died in pursuit of the wrong strategy.

The “what-ifs” of politics are much the same. Looking back now, I see the presidency of George H.W. Bush (the father, that is) as the moment when the revolutionary impetus of the Reagan triumph stalled and went off track. Newt Gingrich attempted, with some success, to recapture the Reaganite spirit in the mid-1990s, but the Lewinsky episode backfired and destroyed Gingrich rather than Clinton. This was followed, in short order, by the deadlocked Florida election of 2000, and by 9/11 and the War on Terror, which led the GOP eventually to the electoral disasters of 2006 and 2008.

For the past several years, then, the Republican Party has been trying to get back to the hegemonic position of dominance it enjoyed after the 2002 and 2004 elections. Yet those were wartime elections, and even in 2004, Bush only won by a narrow majority of the popular vote, so that we see how fragile and thin was the success of the GOP in the “good years” even while Karl Rove and other Bushies were talking about a Permanent Republican Majority.

So, the shutdown strategy: Is Gabriel Malor correct that this has all been a colossal blunder and a waste of time? Perhaps. We should not rule this view out, just because we don’t agree with it, or just because it’s what spineless RINO wussie-boys are saying.

The real problem, anyway, is that Republicans aren’t winning enough elections, so that Obama is president, we have only 45 GOP senators, and John Boehner’s House Republicans control only one-half of one branch of the federal government. Holding a weak hand, Republicans must play it the best they can. We must therefore ask what is the alternative to what their actual strategy has been?

Should House Republicans just “go along to get along”? Should they rubber-stamp whatever Harry Reid’s Democrat majority in the Senate passes? Would such a strategy of collaboration really be better than the headline-making brinksmanship we’ve seen?

It is not enough to criticize what has been done, if we cannot propose a feasible alternative that would be more successful. The problem is not Gabriel Malor, however, and it doesn’t advance the conservative cause to demonize him for his arguments. He may even be right.

 

WHAT? No, hell — of course he’s completely wrong!

Made you think about it though, didn’t I?

 

Fear and Loathing in Moocher Nation

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“Swing voters.” “Independent voters.” “Low-information voters.”

President Obama’s re-election campaign engaged in a sophisticated microtargeting effort that, among other things, aimed TV ads at viewers of late-night comedy, ESPN and the TV Land network.

In other words, the president’s campaign deliberately sought potential voters who were apathetic, disengaged from politics and current affairs, whose lack of interest in (and consequent ignorance of) the political process made them “persuadable” to Obama.

This is how you get weird exit-poll results like 18% of Ohio voters who described themselves as “conservative” voting for Obama.

Obama was re-elected with a hurricane-force tailwind of ignorance, by voters who don’t even know who Harry Reid is, which makes it rather difficult for them to blame Reid for the shutdown.

Stupid voters elect drunks to Congress — the House floor smelled like a distillery during last night’s 9 p.m. vote — and we are subjected to the pathetic spectacle of politics-by-opinion-poll:

CNN Poll: Will Obamacare help you?

Why is the media even asking questions like this? Are the people who answer polls like this fully-informed about the complex causation factors whereby government policy affects economics?

People who don’t currently have health insurance are likely to believe that ObamaCare will “help” them, if they think of it as a something-for-nothing giveaway — “Free Stuff!” — but as P.J. O’Rourke once observed about rent-control policies, the problem with something-for-nothing is that you quickly run out of something and end up with a whole lot of nothing. Demand for anything worth having will inevitably exceed the supply, and this is why we have prices. Attempts to evade the market mechanism of prices, whether through mandates or subsidies or some other government regulatory apparatus, tend to produce market distortions and shortages.

Federal and state governments have been interfering with the market mechanisms of the medical industry and health insurance for decades, and have “succeeded” in the way such interventions usually do, by making everything more complicated, and more expensive for everybody except for those who get health care “free.” Of course, someone must pay for “free” health care, and the transfer of this cost from the recipient of treatment to taxpayers has consequences.

If people need “free” health care because they are able-bodied but unemployed, wouldn’t we have more jobs and better jobs if the economy were prosperous and growing? And if we had lower taxes and fewer regulations, wouldn’t the economy be more healthy?

Furthermore, wouldn’t the economy be stronger overall — wouldn’t there be more demand for goods and services — if people had more incentive to work harder, work more efficiently and work longer hours, in order to make themselves so valuable as workers that employers would compete to hire them, offering health-insurance benefits as a bonus to secure their services? Yet if we establish a system where people receive health insurance whether they are working or unemployed, whether they are efficient and diligent or unproductive and slothful, haven’t we thereby removed a basic incentive to hard work? And, when you think about it, haven’t we removed an incentive to good health?

Have another donut, fatso! Don’t worry about the consequences, because the government will pick up the tab for your heart medicine, your diabetes treatments and therapy for your bad knees.

Also, they’ll pay for your Viagra, because fat guys need love, too.

What about malingerers and hypochondriacs? Everybody knows that some people fake illness, or use relatively minor maladies as an excuse to avoid work. And everybody knows people who are pathologically obsessed with their health, rushing to the doctor every time they get an ache or pain. Some people so enjoy the sympathy they get for being sick that they define their existence by their diseases. You meet these people and haven’t talked to them for five minutes before they start telling you about their “chronic fatigue syndrome” or bipolar disorder or whatever it is that keeps them going to the doctor every week to treat a problem that never gets better.

It would be unfair to say that all such people are suffering from psychosomatic illness or are merely too weak-minded to overcome minor difficulties, but this whiny victimhood attitude — “Feel sorry for me, I’m sick!” — seems far more commonplace now than it was 20 or 30 years ago, and excuse me for suspecting that malingerers and hypochondriacs enthusiastically support ObamaCare.

Subsidizing weaklings and whiners, by providing them “free” health care at taxpayer expense? Not just “no” — hell, no.

Not even the most conservative Republican in Congress is going to say this, because they don’t want to sound “mean-spirited,” but frankly I think we need more mean-spiritedness in Washington. We need politicians who aren’t constantly flattering the idiots who vote for them, who don’t pander to lazy moochers who look at government as if it were Santa Claus giving them Christmas presents.

What we have now is a government of the moochers, by the moochers, for the moochers, with subsidies and free stuff for all.

Or, at least, we had this government, before it shut down. And the idiots chattering on cable TV news shows seem to think this shutdown is a bad idea, for which somebody deserves blame.

ZOMG! THE STATUE OF LIBERTY IS CLOSED!

If you take that kind of frantic nonsense seriously, you should seek psychiatric treatment immediately. Send the bill to ObamaCare.

 

‘Essential’ or ‘Non-Essential’?

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Harry Reid says “no compromise” and, as of this hour, TV talking heads are acting as if a government shutdown is all but certain tonight, which would mean the temporary furlough of “non-essential” government employees, which naturally inspires a few questions:

If they’re not “essential” why did we hire them in the first place?

UPDATE: Don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier:

Could we get the #FurloughJoe hashtag trending?

 

Harry Reid Refuses to Compromise

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Explain to me again how this is the GOP’s fault?

Congress took another step toward a government shutdown Monday as the Senate voted 54-46 to strip language from a House funding bill that delayed ObamaCare by a year. . . .
Democrats also eliminated language allowing employers to opt out of providing insurance coverage of contraception if doing so violates their moral or religious principles.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) needed only a simple majority vote to cut the House language delaying ObamaCare and repealing the medical device tax . . .
Monday’s vote was strictly on party lines.

We shall see whether House Republicans knuckle under. There are reports that they’re getting wobbly on Harry Reid’s shutdown threat.

 

Shutdown Monday: Blame Harry Reid

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The New York Times:

The Senate is expected to reject decisively a House bill that would delay the full effect of President Obama’s health care law as a condition for keeping the government running past Monday, as Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, expressed confidence that he had public opinion on his side.

Why is Harry Reid so confident that he has “public opinion on his side”? Because he can rely on the media to confuse the people:

Democrats and their media allies have spent the past week labeling Republicans “anarchists,” “fanatics,” “radicals,” and “terrorists” who are wholly to blame for the situation that we are told will soon lead to a government shutdown. And if all you know about this situation is what you get from the media, you might actually believe that this is a crisis created by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and his fellow conservatives who sought to use the vote on a short-term spending bill as a means of preventing implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare.
Here’s a simple question: Why are we currently funding the federal government through a series of short-term measures known as “continuing resolutions”?
The answer is that the budgeting process has completely broken down in recent years, and the two men most responsible for that breakdown are President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. For three consecutive years — 2010, 2011, and 2012 — the Democrat-controlled Senate did not pass a budget bill because Reid knew that it would be a political liability to do so. Passing a budget that detailed the Democrats’ plans for spending and revenue as official policy would have exposed the “something for nothing” swindle that Reid and his colleagues are perpetrating on the American people. Republican challengers campaigning against Democrat senators could have cited their votes for the budget bill, saying that the incumbent voted for this, that, or the other unpopular component of the measure.
Reid and the Democrats knew this. They knew very well that the federal deficit was spiraling out of control, that there was not enough tax revenue to pay the mushrooming cost of entitlement programs (Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment, et cetera), and certainly there wasn’t enough revenue to pay for all the boondoggles and giveaways the Democrats voted for in the name of “stimulus.” Adding to this, there was not enough revenue to pay the cost of Obamacare, which Democrats rammed through Congress in March 2010 on a party-line vote. Passing an actual budget would have made clear the unsustainable fiscal nightmare into which Democrat policies have plunged the nation during the Obama Age, and so Harry Reid simply didn’t pass a budget for three years. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike.

 


The Real Crisis the Media Ignores

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Headlines about the danger of a “government shutdown” are misleading, and this is not an accident. Democrats are playing politics, and their media allies are talking about a “crisis” for which they blame Republicans. The noise is intended to distract from what this is really about: It’s not about Ted Cruz and it’s not about ObamaCare.

The deadline to pass a continuing resolution ( which is not a “budget,” although some in the media keep calling it that) is required by the fact that the federal government is nearly $17 trillion in debt, and Democrats don’t want to do anything about that problem. The government is spending more money than it takes in, and this addiction to deficit spending — about $1.86 billion a day — is the underlying reality that the media don’t want you to think about. To put this into perspective, I stated three basic facts on Twitter:

Have you seen anything about this in the mainstream media? Do you remember any reporter asking President Obama, Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi any questions about this problem? Why is President Obama sending out Dan Pfeiffer to compare Republicans to terrorists? Why is Harry Reid ranting about “tea party anarchists“? Why are Republicans being portrayed as if they were the cause of this crisis, while the media ignore the fundamental problem of deficit spending? And why aren’t more Americans demanding answers to these questions?

 

James Fallows, Eminent Fool, and the Surprising Vindication of John C. Calhoun

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“The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is, to divide the community into two great classes; one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes, and, of course, bear exclusively the burthen of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds, through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.”
— John C. Calhoun, Disquisition on Government, 1848

The current phony crisis, in which Sen. Harry Reid has declared that the House must approve the Senate’s spending bill or else the government will shut down, has inspired The Atlantic‘s James Fallows to an extravagant exercise in rhetorical excess:

In case the point is not clear yet: there is no post-Civil War precedent for what the House GOP is doing now. It is radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government, and its departure from past political disagreements can’t be buffed away or ignored. If someone can think of a precedent after the era of John C. Calhoun . . . let me know.

This is as absurd and inappropriate as it is ignorant. To find a recent precedent, we need only go back to the 1990s, when the budget impasse between the new Republican majority in Congress and President Clinton led to a (partial) government shutdown. Or, really, we might consider the extraordinary process by which Reid and Nancy Pelosi shoved ObamaCare through the legislative grinder — “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it,” as Pelosi infamously said — as more truly “radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government” than anything Republicans in Congress are doing now.

Having deliberately ignored the made-for-TV dramatics, I am not the least alarmed by this phony crisis, which is neither particularly new nor remotely frightening. Democrats and their comrades in the media (Fallows was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter) are dishonestly characterizing opposition to ObamaCare as “extremist,” per se.

This is the exact opposite of truth: It is ObamaCare itself that is truly “extremist,” a measure that could only be rammed through Congress with late-night arm-twisting sessions. Were the 34 House Democrats who voted against ObamaCare in March 2010 “extremists”? Or were the millions of voters who elected a Republican House majority in the 2010 mid-term landslide “extremists”?

James Fallows is a partisan Democrat who evidently does not even read conservatives, and who declares illegitimate any reporting that takes seriously the claims of the president’s Republican opponents:

As a matter of journalism, any story that presents the disagreements as a “standoff,” a “showdown,” a “failure of leadership,” a sign of “partisan gridlock,” or any of the other usual terms for political disagreement, represents a failure of journalism and an inability to see or describe what is going on. . . .
For examples of coverage that plainly states what is going on, here is a small sampling: Greg Sargent, Derek Thompson, John Gilmour (on why Ronald Reagan believed in compromise), Jonathan Rauch, Brian Beutler, Jonathan Chait, Andrew Sullivan (also here), Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas, Dan Froomkin. On today’s Diane Rehm show News Roundup, panelists Ruth Marcus, Janet Hook, and Todd Purdum all said with a bluntness unusual for a D.C.-based talk show that we are witnessing the effects not of gridlock but of one party’s internal crisis.

Only those who share the partisan Democrat views of James Fallows,  in other words, are avoiding the “failure of journalism.”

Fallows would have us believe that “what is going on” is not a routine exercise in budget brinksmanship — something to which we have become accustomed as a ritual of divided government — but rather an “internal crisis” exclusive to the Republican Party.

In other words, Democrats are not responsible for anything, Democrats have no obligation to consider the views of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the duly elected representatives of taxpaying citizens, because . . . well, why, really?

Perhaps James Fallows considers the illegitimacy of Republican opposition to ObamaCare self-evident or perhaps, more likely, he expects all his readers to share his partisan Democrat views, and thus also expects them to accept without question the intended putdown of his comparing conservative Republicans to John C. Calhoun.

As the cited passage from Calhoun’s Disquisition demonstrates, however, the South Carolinian who served as Secretary of War (1817-1825) Vice President (1825-1832) and Secretary of State (1844-45) was quite a profound political thinker. Lincoln biographer Thomas L. Krannawitter has called Calhoun “a public intellectual of the highest order . . . renowned for his public oratory . . . a remarkable man, and a uniquely gifted American politician.” Calhoun saw in the successive crises of the 19th century evidence of a dangerous tendency toward the centralization of power in Washington, so that control of the national government conveyed to the party in power an authority that was effectively unlimited. Calhoun articulated the doctrine of States’ Rights as a check on this unlimited authority. Calhoun’s doctrine has been disparaged because of its association with slavery and racial segregation, yet we can trace its historical origin to the Founding Fathers themselves, in a context having nothing whatever to do with slavery or race.

It was Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who, in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-99, invoked the authority of the states to declared the Alien and Sedition Acts null and void. If we examine that crisis, we see that supporters of the Adams administration’s pro-British policy in foreign affairs had in essence sought to outlaw dissent — an odious restriction on First Amendment freedoms.

The next crisis came during Calhoun’s vice presidency, when the so-called “Tariff of Abominations” was passed. Calhoun authored the “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,” which condemned the tariff act as ” imposing duties on imports — not for revenue, but the protection of one branch of industry at the expense of others,” declaring the measure “unconstitutional, unequal, and oppressive, and calculated to corrupt the public virtue and destroy the liberty of the country.” This was a matter not just of policy, but of philosophy, because Calhoun saw that the protectionist measure involved using federal power in ways not contemplated by the Founders, nor consented to by the states in ratifying the Constitution. By gaining a majority in Washington, certain interests sought to enrich themselves through the exercise of federal tax policy, and this abuse was the result of a centralizing tendency that negated the Constitution’s limitations on federal power, converting it “into a great consolidated government, with unlimited powers.”

Well, here we are in 2013, eh?

Nearly $17 trillion in debt — $16,955,657,321,974 as of noon today  — we have added nearly a trillion dollars a year (more than $1.8 billion per day) to the national debt every year since 2008, and it is this endlessly escalating debt that keeps bringing us to these budget crises.

There were no such conflicts during the first two years of Obama’s presidency for the simple reason that he took office when Democrats held an irresistible majority in Congress and could enact whatever policies suited them, including not only ObamaCare, but also a wasteful “stimulus” that added roughly a trillion dollars to the national debt in one fell swoop while doing nothing to restore economic prosperity.

America’s problem, as complex as it may sometimes seem, is really quite simple: We have a federal government with too much power, that spends hundreds of billions dollars more per year than it collects in revenue, and which spends that money to support a system of entitlement programs that is bankrupting us, as well as a regulatory bureaucracy that stifles economic growth. An ever-increasing national debt caused by annual federal budget deficits is the result of Democrat policies that favor the endless expansion of entitlements and bureaucracy, even while they refuse (for the sake of political convenience) to enact the taxes that would be necessary to eliminate the deficits at present spending levels.

Democrats know damned well that the kind of tax increases necessary to generate another $1 trillion a year in federal revenue would strangle the U.S. economy and generate a political backlash. Therefore, Democrats like James Fallows deceptively claim that it is opposition to their policies — and not the policies themselves — which are the cause of our nation’s fiscal problem, and to silence all who speak out against Democrat policies by labeling opponents as “radical” and “dangerous” extremists.

James Fallows (Harvard ’70) is a fool whose only purpose in life is to support the endless errors of the Democrat Party, and to whom truth is always subordinate to partisan interest. Fallows has never been anything but a pretentious hack, as his latest enthusiastic eruption of wordy nonsense should make clear to anyone who had not previously recognized Fallows for the eminent fool he truly is.

And, of course, John C. Calhoun was a Democrat.

 

 

UPDATE: Linked by Bob Belvedere at Camp of the Saints, Walla Walla Tea Party Patriots, The Lonely Conservative, Regular Right Guy,  God’s Own Crunk — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers!