Indeed, Boehner’s great big little cuts seem hardly a cause for capillary bleeding. The anti-Boehner chorus was a tad too shrill, in my estimate. Then again, I had relatively low expectations for the 112th Congress.
You have to understand that our Ruling Class overlords still expect Americans to balk at the pain of any real political chemotherapy. Hence Boehner’s shenanigans. Still, one can’t talk trash at this level without being willing to eat crow:
The GOP has been reluctant to go after Obama as hard as he does them all the way back to 2008. Short of Sarah Palin being elected as a Representative from Alaska tomorrow and then elected Speaker the day after that, I’m hard pressed to see a way for things to change given current leadership.
Part of it may have to do with race, some of it may be traditional GOP fears of losing media battles, still more of it may come from weak and shriveled old GOP hands in Washington too long, who believe business as usual is going to get done in Washington the way it always has. It isn’t.
My gut is that the GOP is timid because they know the jig is up but do not know the reliability of the Tea Parties.
As an impoverished American — hey, buddy, you wanna try raising six kids on a freelance journalist’s income? — I look on in amusement at the self-described “Patriotic Millionaires” who insist that they should pay more taxes. I agree with Moe Lane: “Raise Your Own Damned Taxes.”
Contrary to all the class-warfare demagoguery pouring forth from Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself), conservatives do not oppose tax increases because we are beholden to the rich. Rather, the question is whether wealth does more good when it is invested in the private sector, to create jobs and economic growth, or surrendered to the federal government as taxes to support the metastatic growth of a pestiferous bureaucracy. Rich liberals have always failed to understand blue-collar conservatism, seeking to explain away working-class support of free enterprise as the consequence of a proto-fascist “Authoritarian Personality” or (more recently), bitter gun-and-Bible clinging.
“If you dismiss a priori the possibility that there are rational grounds for resisting the Liberal view of things, one necessarily looks elsewhere than to reason for explanations,” Buckley wrote in his 1959 classic, Up From Liberalism. Buckley observed that “one needs no advanced degrees in clinical psychology and psychoanalytic theory in order to penetrate the fallacy of The Authoritarian Personality” — the most famous work of Adorno, a leader of what has become known as the Frankfurt School of political theory.
Adorno claimed to have proven scientifically that American conservatism was rooted in psychological maladjustment, fostering a tendency toward authoritarianism, which he asserted was the fundamental source of European fascism.
However, as Buckley explained, Adorno’s argument was a tautology based on the implicit presumption that all opposition to liberalism was illegitimate and therefore irrational. Adorno’s theory was “marvelously convenient” for liberals, Buckley said, and it has been recycled periodically ever since.
In fact, whatever the cultural component of conservatism, the Ordinary American’s resistance to redistributionist Welfare State policies is rooted in a common-sense view once magnificently expressed by Ronald Reagan: “No poor man ever gave me a job.” Continue reading ‘No Poor Man Ever Gave Me a Job’ →
This blog was relieved to hear that Girl On The Right’s cleavage is of the ‘First, do no harm’ variety.
In fact, I like to think they improve any environment I happen to be in.
Well, there you have it. Uplifting freshness for all. GOTR is responding to the The Carbon Trust Footprinting Certification Company.
No one, and I mean no one, can convince me that the climate change cabal is anything but a money-making scheme, similar to the pet rock craze of the 70s.
I think the pet rocks themselves may have been more clever. Still no word on what they’re doing with men’s underwear, but something that binds and chafes likely awaits.
There were about five references to sharing in the speech, as I read it on the WSJ. The whole sharing concept, and the generally surreal approach to governance evidenced by the administration, brings to mind none other than Pepper, by the Butthole Surfers:
Marky got with Sharon
And Sharon got Sharice
She was sharing Sharon’s outlook
On the topic of disease
Last night I glanced at the White House talking-points outline of Obama’s Big Important Speech and had to smile at the effrontery of this part:
$4 Trillion in Deficit Reduction: The President is setting a goal of reducing our deficit by $4 trillion in 12 years or less. This deficit reduction would be phased in over time to protect and strengthen our economic recovery and the recovering labor market.
A very old Beltway trick: First, project the budget waaaayyy out in the future, where hypothetical rates of economic growth are always robust, revenue gains are inevitably encouraging and political opposition magically vanishes.
Next, propose reductions in spending that only get semi-drastic in the far-off-in-the-future years of such a forecast.
Voila! You’ve “reduced the deficit” by an Impressively Large Number!
Except, of course, that you haven’t done any such thing. Because (a) the anticipated economic growth never matches the hypothetical forecast, (b) the cuts in spending you “projected” to make six, eight, 10 years in the future don’t actually happen, and instead (c) spending continues to grow due to what’s known as “baseline budgeting.”
So it’s easy as pie to do what Team Obama has done here: Propose $4 trillion in deficit-reduction over 12 years, which when you do the math only amounts to $333 billion a year in spending “cuts” (or tax increases), except that trying to apply math to this “framework” is hopeless, because we’ve got no freaking clue what the economy is going to be doing in 2022 — by which time, of course, Obama will have long since become a very wealthy ex-president who can play golf even more than he does now.
Speaking of the Impressively Large Number trick, here’s another timeless variation: Just make up some numbers.
Call it $38 billion and if it’s actually only $334 million — hey, the president already called it “historic,” so who’s going to notice the discrepancy?
Calls to arm Libya’s rebels and ramp up airstrikes have put the Obama administration on the defensive, after the U.S. dialed back its role in the military campaign last week.
President Barack Obama’s insistence that NATO, not the U.S., take the lead in attacking Moammar Gadhafi’s military is exposing a hard truth about an alliance that never before fought an air campaign with the U.S. in a back seat. Even against an enemy as weak as Libya, NATO needs the backbone of U.S. might to fight effectively.
It’s not a matter of NATO’s 27 non-U.S. member countries having too few combat aircraft, pilots or bombs. The problem instead is that while some, such as France and Britain, are willing to participate fully, others have limited their roles to noncombat action, and still others have decided not to participate militarily at all.
NATO’s internal debate over Libya has now broken into public view, with Britain and France publicly blaming other members for the slow pace of the bombing campaign. The Brits and French are right, but the real problem here is a military intervention with half-hearted U.S. involvement and incompatible goals. Moammar Gadhafi must be smiling at his luck. . . .
If the U.S., France and Britain can’t topple a tinhorn despot like Gadhafi who is loathed by most of his own people, the damage to Western credibility will be severe and long-lasting.
There weren’t any reports last night of major ground actions on the Brega/Ajdabiya front. It appears that Qaddafi’s forces are licking their wounds and regrouping after the weekend battle at Ajdabiya. The fighting continues in Misrata, where rebels are besieged by Qaddafi’s army. And at a meeting in Qatar of allies supporting the Libya rebels, there was talk of loaning the rebels $2 billion.
As a country that values fairness, wealthier individuals have traditionally borne a greater share of this burden than the middle class or those less fortunate. . . .
To meet this challenge [i.e., ballooning deficits], our leaders came together three times during the 1990s to reduce our nation’s deficit. They forged historic agreements that required tough decisions made by the first President Bush and President Clinton; by Democratic Congresses and a Republican Congress. All three agreements asked for shared responsibility and shared sacrifice, but they largely protected the middle class, our commitments to seniors, and key investments in our future. . . .
The America I know is generous and compassionate; a land of opportunity and optimism. We take responsibility for ourselves and each other; for the country we want and the future we share. . . .
We have to think about our fellow citizens with whom we share a community.
We might point out that the “historic agreements” hailed by Obama were, in fact, just kicking the can down the road so far as the explosion of federal entitlement programs is concerned. Or we could talk about how it might be easier to care for these “fellow citizens with whom we share a community,” if Democrats did not insist on giving federal benefits to illegal aliens. But what really brought me up short was this sentence from the president’s speech:
There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.
Tax cuts are not “spending.”
Whoever wrote that sentence is looking at other people’s money as if a certain proportion of that money belonged to the government. Only from such a perspective is it “spending” to let people keep their own money.
Also, whoever wrote that sentence failed to take into account the Laffer Curve — whereby lowering tax rates can actually increase overall tax revenue — nor did the writer of that sentence demonstrate any cognizance of global competition for investment. The United States currently has corporate tax rates that are higher than rates in several of our international competitors. Why should global corporations create or expand U.S. operations, if such investments will cause them to pay higher taxes than if they invested in other countries?
Obama’s speechwriters don’t seem to think about such things. His speech was long on high-flown rhetoric about “sharing,” but short on specific details. It was a political speech, rather than a policy speech, and the whole point of it was to position Obama for his 2012 re-election campaign. Insofar as the president actually proposed any policy, the speech could be summed up with Ed Morrissey’s headline:
And as Ed says: “If it was possible to fail to meet the already-low expectations set for this speech beforehand, Obama managed to do it. . . . It’s almost impossible to present a substantive criticism of the proposal because it contains nothing substantive, an impression that more and more people have of this White House.”
As a president, Obama is a damn good candidate. But governing is not campaigning, and his constant attempts to substitute campaign rhetoric for actual policy proposals is at the core of his failure as president.
