Here’s the deal that Barack Obama demanded of the House controlled by Republicans, (who, in case you missed it, also won on election day in 2012.)
He demanded a $1.6 Trillion increase in taxes over 10 years, coupled with an increase in spending by another cool $1 Trillion per year, added to the baseline. He demanded to not only have the debt ceiling increased to pay for furthering the deficit, but also demanded that the House permanently give up its constitutional control of the purse strings by granting the President unlimited ability to use America’s credit card until such time as our creditors see fit to cut us off. This alone caused uncontrollable laughter amongst not only Republican lawmakers who heard it without warning from Timothy Geitner, the tax cheat turned Treasury Secretary sent to relay the offer tendered by our President, who campaigned on his ability to bring a divided America back together again, but even had some members of the Democrat Caucus in stitches.
So, what olive branch did the President offer in exchange for the gift of unconstrained power free from the shackles of an onerous constitutional system of checks and balances? I am so glad you asked. He offered, wait for it……………………
$1 Trillion in budgetary concessions to be taken from future base line expenditures spread over 10 years to begin in 10 years.
If that seems a little familiar, it’s because we’ve all seen this movie before. We get promised spending cuts in the future, usually at some point in time when not one single politician who struck this deal will even be around to deal with the consequences. Those spending cuts will not even be true cuts, because they will be based on that enduring joke called base line budgeting, in which spending more can be labeled a cut, so long as in some previous year, a dishonest law maker had the foresight to stipulate that we planned to spend even more than an insane increase during the year in question. Since future Congresses and future Presidents are not subject to the deals made today, those cuts will never happen anyhow. Think of Lucy tearing away that football on Charlie Brown, and you will have some idea as to how this history has always played out in the past. (As I’ve written before, we’re still waiting on Congress to make good on those budget cuts offered to Ronald Reagan during the budget compromise of 1982.)
The answer came to us today, as to how goofy this offer was. Steny Hoyer(D) Maryland, announced today that of course President Obama was not serious with this, it was merely posturing. Putting aside for the moment that he actually went out and stumped for his deal as if the Presidential campaign were still in full swing, why start off with something this insincere at all?
I am not certain on what evidence people decided that Barack Obama would, “bring our disparate political leaders together in order to reach bipartisan feelings of Kumbayah,” but this offering of a solution that turned out to be nothing but a waste of time is simply not the efforts that would be taken by someone who took their position of leadership seriously. The President’s offer starts by increasing taxes beyond the increase set to occur by leaping off of the, “fiscal cliff,” It seeks to increase spending by an amount greater than all previous increases in spending, throughout our history, and it seeks to strip the House of it’s lone Constitutional power, and have that granted in perpetuity to the President, who just happens to be Barack Obama. This is a man who wants to go over the falls in a barrel. He just also wants Americans to blame someone else for it, which is pretty much the way he operates.
