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Jennifer Rubin treats us to Mitch McConnell’s speech from yesterday.
“Incredibly, for those of us who had been calling for action on this issue day in and day out for about two years, the President tried to put the burden on us. With the nation edging closer to the debt limit deadline, the President retreated behind the poll-tested rhetoric of class warfare.
“At a moment when we needed leadership the most, we got the least. The financial security of the nation was being gambled on the President’s wager that he could convince people our problems would be solved if we just all agreed to take it out on the guy in the fancy house down the street.
“In my view, that was the saddest commentary on the status of the leadership at the White House.
“And I’m proud of the fact that Republicans refused to play along.
“We stood our ground. We know that what Americans need right now is for government to make job creation easier, not harder. And we said so. At a time when 14 million Americans are looking for work, we refused to support a tax hike. We supported jobs and economic growth instead.
“For more than two years now, Republicans in Washington have stood united in the belief that America would never recover from the economic crisis that struck our nation three years ago, so long as some in Washington persisted in the mistaken belief that government had the cure.”
Wall Street Journal Editors like Mitch McConnell’s debt limit plan.
Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said yesterday he’s concluded that no deal to raise the debt ceiling in return for serious spending restraint is possible with President Obama, and who can blame him? We’ve never thought the debt ceiling was the best leverage for a showdown over the entitlement state, and now it looks like Mr. Obama is trying to use it as a way to blame the GOP for the lousy economy.
This may have been the President’s strategy all along: Take the debt-limit talks behind closed doors, make major spending cuts seem possible in the early days, but then hammer Republicans publicly as the deadline nears for refusing to raise taxes on business and “the rich.”
This would explain the President’s newly discovered fondness for press conferences, which he has rarely held but now rolls out before negotiating sessions. It would also explain why Mr. Obama’s tax demands have escalated as the August 2 deadline nears. Yesterday he played the Grandma Card, telling CBS that seniors may not get their August retirement checks. Next he’ll send home the food inspectors and stop paying the troops. …
Neal Boortz on the jobs numbers.
… Here’s a little factoid about our unemployment levels. The recession began 38 months ago. In all previous recessions since WWII employment has risen by an average of 3.7% over that 38-month period; that’s 3.7% above the employment level at the beginning of the recession. Under Obama employment is now 5% below what it was at the start of the recession. That’s a swing of almost 9%. But remember — it’s all Bush’s fault, and if it’s not Bush’s fault it’s because of the weather and gas prices. And of course Obama’s moves to pretty much halt all exploration and expanded production on domestic oil sources hasn’t had a thing to do with gas prices. …
James Pethokoukis says don’t blame Boehner.
President Barack Obama could have done two things that might have saved his Mother of All Budget Deals.
First, he could have embraced market-centered, consumer -focused reforms to Medicare. That was about as likely as him accepting an Obamacare rollback. Second, he could have agreed — as House Speaker John Boehner and Republicans suggested — to sharply reduce tax rates in return for fewer special tax deductions/breaks/loopholes/subsidies. Recall that is what his own debt commission recommended. …
… Obama sees a need for a permanently bigger government and a lot more tax revenue to fund it. Had Obama agreed with his own debt commission and Republicans, a big agreement was possible. Or he could have proposed real reforms to entitlements. But he declined and there wasn’t a mega-deal. Don’t blame Boehner for that.
John Steele Gordon on the Ignorant One.
President Obama’s press conference yesterday—in which he only took questions from left-leaning reporters apparently–contained an amazing statement. It should be noted the first two instances of the first person singular pronoun in the sentence refer to Barack Obama, President of the United States. The second two refer to Barack Obama, taxpaying citizen:
“And I do not want, and I will not accept, a deal in which I am asked to do nothing, in fact, I’m able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don’t need, while a parent out there who is struggling to figure out how to send their kid to college suddenly finds that they’ve got a couple thousand dollars less in grants or student loans.”
There is, of course, nothing whatever stopping Barack Obama, taxpaying citizen, from donating his excess income to the United States Treasury. But his statement demonstrates an astonishing economic illiteracy. To be sure, someone earning a great deal of money has an income greater than what he spends. You can only spend so much on luxurious living however hard you try, a reality so rich with comic possibilities that a 1902 novel called Brewster’s Millions has been made into a movie no fewer than nine times.
But, unlike Scrooge McDuck, the rich do not put the excess in a vast money bin and frolic about in it. They invest it. What a concept! Where does Obama think new capital comes from, the tooth fairy? It’s nothing more than the excess of income over outgo. Take away the income the rich “don’t need” and spend it on social programs, and capital formation in this country drops to zero.
James Pethokoukis wants to know when the government will eat its peas, shows us the unemployment rate they don’t want us to know about, and says default is unlikely.
Niall Ferguson on the fire this time.
… What all the Indignant have in common is the refusal to address squarely the problem that nearly all Western countries face. That problem is that the welfare systems that evolved in the mid-20th century are unaffordable under the demographic and economic circumstances of the 21st century. The financial crisis has merely exacerbated what was already a severe structural crisis of public finance, boosting deficits while slowing growth.
The scale of the challenge ranges from the really, really hard to the absolutely impossible. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, just to stabilize its debt the U.S. government needs to turn its current primary deficit of 7 percent of gross domestic product into a primary surplus of 1.4 percent. That’s roughly double the fiscal squeeze Greece needs to make. …