The Obama Plan: Raise Taxes and Fake Spending Cuts

From the AP:

…The president on Monday will announce a proposal that includes repeal of Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers, nearly $250 billion in reductions in Medicare spending, $330 billion in cuts in other mandatory benefit programs, and savings of $1 trillion from the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, the officials said…

…Key features of the proposal:

–$1.5 trillion in new revenue, which would include about $800 billion realized over 10 years from repealing the Bush-era tax rates for couples making more than $250,000. It also would place limits on deductions for wealthy filers and end certain corporate loopholes and subsidies for oil and gas companies.

–$580 billion in cuts in mandatory benefit programs, including $248 billion in Medicare and $72 billion in Medicaid and other health programs. Other mandatory benefit programs include farm subsidies.

–$430 billion in savings from lower interest payment on the national debt…

According to the linked article, 90% of the Medicare cuts will be in the form of reduced payments to providers – and while beneficiaries are expected to pay more, they won’t pay until 2017…in other words, not until after Obama finishes his putative 2nd term.  How much you want to bet that once the providers scream – and/or start refusing Medicare cases – that the cuts never materialize?

A trillion dollars of the “cuts” are from not fighting in Afghanistan…in other words, not money already appropriated and now cut, but a mythical figure placed on the table bearing no relation to what might actually happen in Afghanistan.

Lower interest payments on the national debt?  Fine – that’ll work until we hit 16 or 17 trillion in debt and our bond prices go “Greek” on us.

This proposal is nothing but a crock of political horse manure.  For cynicism it is hard to beat. We’re on the brink of economic and fiscal disaster and Obama comes up with a plan which doesn’t fix the budget and doesn’t help the economy.  All it does is provide him with some MSM/DNC talking points in his effort to make the 2012 campaign about Congress rather than himself (the tax hikes won’t fly and the spending cuts will be resisted by his own party…so when the plan fails to pass, Obama can say, “I tried to do it, but those dratted  Republicans stopped me!”).  The United States can go drop off a cliff…Obama has more important things to do, like getting re-elected!

2012 really can’t get here fast enough…and it won’t work, Barry.  We’re all on to the scam.  Twist things as much as you like – go ahead and go through your motions.  We’re still going to crush you and liberalism next year.  We’ve all had enough of this garbage.

HAT TIP:  Mish’s

Liberalism’s Pervasive Racism

They just can’t stop gnawing that bone – from the Washington Post:

With House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) announcement Thursday of her three appointees to the bipartisan debt “supercommittee,” the panel’s 12-member roster is complete. It represents a broad range of ideological views, from House Republican Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) on the right to Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) on the left.

But the group’s membership is marked by a problem that has plagued Congress — a lack of gender and racial diversity…

This just gets so tiresome – it doesn’t matter what a person’s sex or skin color is – all that matters is what they believe and what they do.  I wouldn’t care if the entire panel was made up of differently-abled trans-gendered persons of color…as long as they were patriots who had America’s best interests at heart.  The problem is not a lack of sex and skin color differences, but the fact that the liberal members of the panel – black, while, male and female – are rigid, left wing ideologues who only care about getting Obama and the rest of the Democrats re-elected.

This liberal racism just goes too far these days…everything is based upon skin color or sexual identity.  No one is allowed to broaden their mind and look at things from a different point of view.  We’re to have the “black view” or the “woman view” or the whatever view…no way that I, as a white man, can look with sympathy upon a black man, no way that he can do the same for me.

Utter rot – complete racist nonsense.  Way past time to end this sort of garbage.  America no longer has any place for people to play racial politics…and that is another thing we’re going to have to fight to end through the 2012 campaign.

Who is Bankrupting America?

Tino over at Super-Economy has the chart:

 

There is simply no arguing with this – Obama has massively increased spending since he took office.  It isn’t just a slight difference, it is night and day.  He’s gone on a binge of spending – and that means that if we want to get our deficit under control, the only rational thing to do is at least return it to the average.

The reason Obama and his Democrats won’t do this is because when they finally gained full control of the government in January of 2009 – for the first time since 1994 – they were determined to pump up all the spending they couldn’t get when all or part of the government was under GOP control.  They pined away for this…for years they dreamed of the day when the Treasury and the printing press would be entirely theirs and they could spend to their heart’s content.  They aren’t about to give it up.  First off because a reduction in spending would reduce their immediate power (they ability to buy votes with taxpayer money), secondly because they have vastly enriched their cronies and don’t dare take it away.

This isn’t about tossing granny over the cliff – cutting spending is about taking Democrat special interest groups and crony-capitalists off the government teat.  That is what the whole debate really comes down to – will we reduce the spending, save our economy and rebuild our nation?  Or will we continue to lavish money on Democrats and their hangers-on until America is destroyed?

The fight is on – 2012 will decide it; but as we fight it, don’t for a minute let Democrats tell you they are helping granny…they are just helping themselves and greedily and senselessly want to keep doing it no matter what happens.

Sen. Toomey to the Debt Committee

From NRO’s The Corner:

Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.), who found out this morning that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) had selected him to serve on the congressional “super-committee,” said he “very strongly hopes” the panel can reach an agreement to avoid triggering the fallback measure that includes deep cuts to defense spending. In order for that to happen, Toomey told reporters on a conference call Wednesday, both parties will have to compromise. “If this committee is going to be successful, it absolutely has to have bipartisan support,” he said. “That’s how it was set up. This has to be done in a cooperative fashion.”

The freshman senator and former Club for Growth president said his “guiding principles” on the committee will be “the twin goals of reducing the deficit and continuing to promote economic growth.” To that end, he hopes to reform the tax code in order to broaden the base while lowering rates and growing the economy. “That will also generate more revenue,” he said. “A stronger economy always does.”…

Toomey is an excellent choice and, also, a pledge to the TEA Party and conservatism in general that they have a voice in this committee.  Do read the whole linked article as Toomey lays out an excellent vision of what this committee can and should accomplish.  If good will and public spirit can accomplish anything, then Toomey will do it.

On the other hand, the purpose of the committee – as far as Democrats are concerned – is to cut defense and ratify tax hikes (especially on those “millionaires and billionaires” who make $200,000.00 a year).  Failing that, the Democrats’ hope that a smash up of the committee can be blamed on the Republicans and be used as part of the overall “smear and fear” campaign they are planning for 2012 (very telling is Reid’s selection of Sen. Murray for the committee – she is chair of the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee…in other words, the Democrat Senator with the most vested interest in playing pure politics on the committee).  In short, while Toomey wants to do what is right, Democrats want to claw on to power…it’ll make for an interesting battle.

At the end of it, either Toomey’s spirit of patriotic compromise will prevail, or the whole thing will blow up…but if the Republicans on the committee hang tough on core principals (genuine spending reduction and tax reform which doesn’t punish the middle class nor destroy wealth creation), then the blow up will be right in the Democrats’ face.  Fundamentally, the American people are on the side of reasonable compromise to reduce spending and grow the economy…that is what they want, and that is what the GOP must stand for.  If Democrats sabotage it then the people will see right through that…and only if the GOP caves in and goes along will we be blamed for any failure.

We are at a crossroads for our nation – between now and November of 2012 we will decide if we remain a great, free and prosperous nation, or if we are to sink in to decline and eventual destruction.  Each step we take must be informed by a genuinely patriotic desire to do what is best for America…in this, there is a time to fight it out in the trenches, and a time to seek reasonable compromise.  The opening of the debt committee is the time for reasonable compromise.  The Democrats will, I am certain, reject this course…but let them do it, first…then we’ll have the approval of the American people to get down and dirty with them.

Sarah Palin Proves She’d be a Better President

A long article on her Facebook page says all that needs to be said – do read the whole thing.  Here’s the crux of the matter regarding our debt:

… we need to get serious about our deficit. No more accounting gimmicks. No more cuts in “out-years” that never materialize. The permanent political class in D.C. might be fooling themselves with these Enron-like accounting games, but they’re not fooling the world’s capital markets. And we don’t need any more happy talk from the White House about “investing” in solar shingles and really fast trains. The White House shouldn’t even bother floating these new spending programs. We can’t afford them. Period. We need to stop this deficit spending, balance our budget, repeal Obamacare, cancel all unused stimulus funds, and reform our entitlement programs. We have to have an adult conversation about our spending commitments; circumstances have changed, and we must adapt. I know none of this will be easy, but, “thick” or not, the average American outside the D.C. politico bubble knows that we no longer have a choice! We will have entitlement reform and a balanced budget; it’s just a matter of how. We can do it ourselves in a calm, methodical, and responsible manner, or we can wait for the world’s capital markets to ram it down on us. Let’s be responsible and do it ourselves. And let’s get serious about reducing the size of government across the board and rooting out waste. How many more reports (that today are destined to merely gather dust on the shelf) do we need about duplicative and unnecessary programs before we actually do something about government waste?…

The whole thing is clear and concise and lays out the problem – fearlessly stating truths that Obama turns away from.  Obama would prefer to carp about “millionaires and billionaires” and have his minions try to make “TEA Party downgrade” go viral…but a real President will face the facts and propose changes which will solve the problem.

I don’t know if Sarah Palin will run – but if she does and obtains the nomination she’ll beat Obama in a landslide for the simple fact that she tells the truth and Obama doesn’t.

Defending the TEA Party

From NRO’s The Corner:

Sen. John McCain defended the Tea Party against Sen. John Kerry’s “tea party downgrade” remark on Meet the Press this morning.

“We could have reached an agreement a lot earlier, but the members of the House of Representatives had a mandate last November, and it was jobs and the economy and it was spending. And for them to then agree to tax increases and spending increases was obviously a repudiation of the mandate they felt they had from last November,” McCain said.

He said that much of the “dysfunction” in the current political system could be attributed to “the failure of the president of the United States to lead.”…

Some times John McCain can be infuriating, other times he’s just so right.  And gutsy – right now, the MSM/DNC drumbeat is that the TEA Party caused the problem.  Here is a chance for “moderate” GOPers to flee and mumble their agreement.  Not for John McCain – he just told it like it is:  the TEA Party is about cutting government spending.  To have agreed to tax hikes in lieu of serious spending cuts (and what we got in the deal was no where near “serious” enough to warrant signing off on revenue increases) would have been a rank betrayal.

To be sure, Democrats are all about that – in fact, over the past 40 years Democrats have mostly managed to advance their cause by gift of GOPers betraying principle and go along with whatever liberal flapdoodle is the fashion of the moment.  Remember Arlen Specter – that was the sort of “Republican” who was forever cutting the GOP off at the knees.  And that is precisely the sort of Republican the TEA Party people will not be.

Ultimately, we may have to obtain higher revenues in order to get out of this mess – but the fact of the matter is that Democrats will just lie about the spending cuts and greedily spend any increased revenue on their special interests.  In a very real sense, the Democrat leadership in the United States doesn’t care about the United States.  If they did, they would have proposed a real cut in next year’s spending – even if it were a symbolic cut of 10 or 20 billion.  I mean, of course, real cuts – not reductions in the rate of growth, but an actual spending of less money next year than we did this year.  Until Democrats show a real change of heart – show that they care more about America than they do about their own power and wealth – then we simply cannot go along with them…and thus the TEA Party standing firm against any tax hikes was an act of sublime patriotism.  It took away from those who are destroying the United States part of their ability to keep doing it.

McCain sees it; I see it, too.  Eventually, the whole country will see it – and I do believe that this growing understanding of what is really happening will destroy liberalism in 2012.

UPDATE:  In Canada, Saskatchewan gets a “TEA Party upgrade” to it’s bond rating:

…Rather than quickly spending its newly-earned wealth, the provincial government has put its tax revenue toward paying the bills. S&P gave special credit to Saskatchewan for its “low-and-declining debt burden.” As of March 31, the province’s fiscal year-end, Saskatchewan’s debt totalled $4.6-billion, representing 38 per cent of this year’s projected operating revenues and only 8 per cent of its gross domestic product. Canada’s federal debt-to-GDP ratio sits at around 35 per cent…

Rational tax and regulatory policies, a pro-business environment, fiscal responsibility which puts a premium on living within means and paying debt.  This isn’t rocket science, people…

GOP Wants Open Debt Committee Hearings

From Newsmax:

Much of Washington’s attention is now focused on the bipartisan congressional committee that will soon be formed to recommend how to reduce the budget deficit by $1.5 trillion. And Republicans are working hard to ensure that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction holds all its meetings in public, The Hill reports.

Six GOP senators sent a letter to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Wednesday urging that the committee’s business be “done in a transparent manner through advanced public notification, public attendance and live television broadcasts, . . . not behind closed doors.”

The signers include Sens. Dean Heller of Nevada, David Vitter of Louisiana, Mike Lee of Utah, John Boozman of Arkansas, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin…

Good for them and I entirely agree…let us call witnesses who can explain exactly what we’re spending money on and what we can cut without touching a single social security, medicare, medicaid or military pay check.  Hundreds of billions are being spent each year on perfectly worthless activities (including activities hidden within otherwise worthy programs), and the more exposure we can get, the better our chances of a popular demand for cuts.

The people are on our side in the debt battle – we know it must be cut, all we have to do is show where and how much.  Open committee hearings will give us our best chance.

How to Cut – Really Cut – Government Spending

It isn’t hard – from Zero Hedge:

…In a nutshell: do to the government, what the privates sector has done to itself in the past 3 years, and fire 15% of the federal government workforce…

…slimming the US government ever so modestly, by just 15%, would generate savings of $117.4 billion a year, or $1.4 trillion over the next 10 years. And no, these are not reductions in future spendings: these are real actionable cuts from the day they are enacted, with fungible cash able to be used for any other, much more needed purposes, up to and including economically stimulative projects, which actually generate jobs for the private sector…

Ah, but that would mean less government employees, and thus less government union members…and so less donations to Democrats seeking power.  It is a nauseating circle of corruption…demands for big government in order to pay for politicians backing big government who will then make government even bigger.

Now, why didn’t the GOP go this rout?  For two reasons:

1.  The TEA Party element is strong, but it is not dominant in the GOP.  It can stop some things from happening, but it cannot yet force through genuinely conservative/libertarian policies.

2.  Even as the TEA Party element rises from strength to strength, we have to deal with the reality that the American people installed an ultra-leftist President in 2008.  Obama simply will not – cannot, in fact – make genuine cuts in spending.  Liberal Democrats had been slavering for years in anticipation of just that day…the day they managed to hoodwink the American people in to voting an ultra-leftist President in to office while ultra-leftists controlled the Congress.  They essentially upped government spending by a trillion dollars annually and this is to be the “new normal”; no liberal is ever going to be allowed to cut in to it.

But what this proposal shows is that without even for a moment altering the basic structure of our government, massive spending cuts are possible.  The government is so impossibly over-bloated that you can make cuts of $100 billion a year and you’ll still have an overwhelming behemoth of government.  All the talk of throwing granny over the cliff is just so much liberal lies…and they simply must know it; no one is actually that stupid.

Get ready for the political fight of your life – 2012 will be the final battle between liberty and Big Government.  One of the two will prevail, and probably prevail for good.

Boehner: “The Best We Could Get”

From NRO’s The Corner:

House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) told GOP members on a conference call Sunday evening that he had reached a deal with congressional leaders and the White House, but that it wouldn’t happen “unless we have membership on board.” It remains to be seen how many House Republicans will end up supporting the final package, but members on the call told National Review Online they thought it would ultimately pass with bipartisan support. “I’m not sure I’m going to support it but I think it will probably pass,” said freshman Rep. Dennis Ross (R., Fla.). Members described the tone of the call as overwhelmingly positive, with many praising Boehner’s efforts in the negotiations. Despite his concerns about the final deal, Ross said “leadership has done a very good job of getting it to this point,” and described a sense of relief among members, many of whom may not love the deal, but are nonetheless happy to be moving on to the next fight.

According to sources, Boehner said the deal was “the best that we could get.” In particular, he thanked the 87 freshmen members for their input, without which “we wouldn’t have gotten this far.” Ross concurred. “I think the freshman class has been very valuable to this process,” he said…

That last bit is really best translated as, “goodness, we didn’t fully realize until now that these TEA Party people are serious!”.  But, all in all, it is a good thing – this is the first time since the glory days of 1995 that a GOP House Speaker can count on a solid, conservative GOP caucus…one which won’t go all soft on him in return for campaign cash and other DC blandishments.  But it is not the best we could get – it is the best that the GOP could get using this strategy.

We need to think carefully not just about what we want, but how we want to get there.  We did not do a good enough job of forcing the Democrats to defend their disgusting Big Government liberalism – they were defensive, to be sure, but they were still defending the concept of using government money to be nice to people…we need tactics which will expose the fact that they really want to use government to reward liberal cronies.

A relentless drumbeat of just who among the rich and powerful are getting government money and just who they donate to (and speak and write in favor of) should be used in the next battle.  Show the American people that “food for the starving” really works out to “Cadillac for Nancy Pelosi’s crony-capitalist”.  These people on the left have been looting the Treasury for decades.  Sweat heart deals for government contracts, special tax and regulatory breaks:  things like that and the pols get, in return, campaign cash, investment tips and well paid corporate sinecures once out of office.  Show this to the American people…force the liberals away from defending charity and in to defending their greed for wealth and power.

We also need to win the class war – and my idea of a “wealth tax” is the best way to end that battle once and for all.  Democrats are endlessly harping on how we GOPers want to steal food out of granny’s mouth so we can give tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires.  Do them one better – propose a tax which will won’t hit anyone except a millionaire or billionaire and watch the Democrats try to stop it…force them to reveal that their “tax the rich” rhetoric is really “tax the middle class, leave our rich donors alone”.

Still and all a good effort.  Big Government liberalism is firmly on the defensive – and Obama and his Democrats will have to defend their worthless, wasteful, immoral and un-American welfare State all through 2012.  We have them on the run – now, let’s push them over the edge, and take back our country.

Debt Deal Done, Fake Crisis Averted

Hot Air has the details - it mostly works out to a defeat for the left as it looks like they didn’t get tax hikes, didn’t get as much new debt ceiling as they wanted and were prevented from gutting defense.  The deal was done because, in the end, Obama saw his approval rating cratering and wanted to stop the bleeding – some times you do have to let a crisis go to waste.  Especially when you made one up out of whole cloth.

The real budget crisis comes in 2015 or so if we don’t significantly cut spending by then.  While Obama is President, we won’t be able to do that – so the whole solution to our real budget crisis is to get Obama out of the White House in 2012.