Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Paul Ryan calls out the president. Wants to know where his budget is.
During the negotiations over raising the debt ceiling, President Obama reportedly warned Republican leaders not to call his bluff by sending him a bill without tax increases. Republicans in Congress ignored this threat and passed a bill that cuts more than a dollar in spending for every dollar it increases the debt limit, without raising taxes.
Yesterday, Mr. Obama signed this bill into law. He was, as he said, bluffing.
Nevertheless, the president still hasn’t shown us his cards. He still hasn’t put forward a credible plan to tackle the threat of ever-rising spending and debt, and his evasiveness is emblematic of the party he leads.
Ever since they abused the budget process to jam their health-care takeover through Congress last year, the Democrats have simply done away with serious budgeting altogether. The simplest explanation—and the president’s real bluff—is that they don’t want to commit publicly to the kind of tax increases and health-care rationing that would be required to sustain their archaic vision of government.
The president’s February budget deliberately dodged the tough choices necessary to confront the threat of runaway federal spending. It was rejected unanimously in a Senate controlled by his own party. …
Michael Barone thinks the president was missing in action.
In the negotiations that produced the bill the 44th president of the United States seemed to be more of an onlooker than a participant.
The president went into this controversy well armed. The Constitution grants him a veto which can be overridden only by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. Administratively he has at hand the expertise of the career professionals in the Office of Management and Budget and a competent and experienced budget director. He had the political weapon of the threat of chaos and economic disaster if the deadline of August 2, set by his Treasury secretary last April, was not met. …
… Obama promised to unite the country. Instead he has united the opposition, antagonised the centre and demoralised his base. Let us just say this is not what he set out to do.
David Harsanyi celebrates the success of the “terrorists” in Washington.
… No amount of hysterics changes the fact that there has been realignment to the national conversation. The country has been radicalized by reality. A new CNN poll finds that though they rightly disapprove with everyone involved, 65 percent of those polled think that cuts in the debt deal were appropriate. Most polls find that voters believe government is too large and favor spending cuts. Remember that polls showed that most voters were against raising the debt limit at all.
It’s not the terrorists who drive this change. It’s the evidence. It’s the economic suffering that “spreading it around” policy has created. It’s institutionalization of a recession. For a while, at least, those who claim that bankruptcy spending and bullet trains create jobs — no matter how regularly the media offer these myths as fact — can’t be taken seriously.
Fleeting as this shift may be, we were brought a sliver of good news this week. During one glorious day, the United States passed legislation with the sole intention of cutting government rather than “creating” so-called jobs or “investing” in some cockamamie energy boondoggle or “helping” “working families” — which is, of course, the biggest help Washington can offer us. For that, we can thank the “terrorists.”
More from Harsanyi’s blog.
To put things in perspective: this year alone the federal government spent $1.7 trillion more than it took in. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the John Boehner plan (really more of a recommendation), cuts $917 billion in spending growth over 10 years. That‘s barely more than the debt ceiling hike that’s been proposed and far less than we overspent this one year alone. …
Toby Young in Telegraph Blogs has more on the victory of the tea party.
For British conservatives, the US debt deal is a thing of beauty. Under the terms of the deal, the federal government will cut spending by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years and there won’t be any corresponding increase in taxation. That is to say, the American Government has agreed to tackle its deficit by spending cuts alone. The British Government, by contrast, is planning to cut its deficit through a combination of spending cuts and tax rises – and it’s cutting it by a smaller amount.
Even if the Tory Party had won an overall majority at the last election, it’s hard to imagine it adopting such a bold fiscal policy. Yet the American Government is on the verge of adopting this plan in spite of the fact that the Democrats control the Senate and the White House. A year ago, American conservatives were showering David Cameron with praise for adopting such a radical approach to reducing Britain’s deficit and contrasting him unfavourably with their own spendthrift President. Now, our Prime Minister looks like a weak-kneed liberal in contrast to the hard-headed Obama. Whatever happened to the stimulus?
Most pundits are crediting this U-turn to the political muscle of the Tea Party and it’s true that President Obama would never have agreed to this deal if the Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives hadn’t engaged in the brinkmanship of the past few weeks. But to focus on the Tea Party is to ignore the tectonic political shift that’s taken place, not just in America but across Europe. The majority of citizens in nearly all the world’s most developed countries simply aren’t prepared to tolerate the degree of borrowing required to sustain generous welfare programmes any longer. …
Ross Douthat at the NY Times tries to understand why the administration is doing so poorly.
By rights, Barack Obama should be emerging as the big political winner in the debt ceiling debate. For months, he’s positioned himself near the center of public opinion, leaving Republicans to occupy the rightward flank. Poll after poll suggests that Americans prefer the president’s call for a mix of spending cuts and tax increases to the Republican Party’s anti-tax approach. Poll after poll shows that House Republicans, not Obama, would take most of the blame if the debt ceiling weren’t raised.
Yet the president’s approval ratings have been sinking steadily for weeks, hitting a George W. Bush-esque low of 40 percent in a recent Gallup survey. The voters incline toward Obama on the issues, still like him personally and consider the Republican opposition too extreme. But they are increasingly judging his presidency a failure anyway.
The administration would no doubt blame this judgment on the steady stream of miserable economic news. But it should save some of the blame for its own political approach. Ever since the midterms, the White House’s tactics have consistently maximized President Obama’s short-term advantage while diminishing his overall authority. Call it the “too clever by half” presidency: the administration’s maneuvering keeps working out as planned, but Obama’s position keeps eroding. …
Peter Wehner reminds us just how sycophantic the mainstream press was on the election of the One.
As President Obama?’s approval drops to 40 percent and independents are fleeing him in droves, as the economy continues to stagger and comparisons to the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter? are increasingly being made by Democrats, it’s worth recalling the almost cult-like reverence Obama inspired after his election. You need not go further than this November 7, 2008 broadcast of “The Charlie Rose Show,” which featured a conversation with David Remnick of The New Yorker and historians Alan Brinkley? and Michael Beschloss?.
“The extraordinary outpouring of celebration, joy, and hope all over the world at this election is something I could never have imagined in my lifetime,” according to Professor Brinkley.”There’s a discipline to Obama that is so extraordinary,” he raved. And then he added: “I don’t think we’ve had a president since Lincoln who has the oratorical skills that Obama has. Obama has that quality that Lincoln had.”
Remnick, too, compared Obama’s rhetorical skills to Lincoln. The campaign also “shows him in a decision-making mold that is very encouraging.” Obama demonstrates a “receptivity to ideas outside the frame” and possesses a “worldview that allows for complexity.” He “assumes a maturity in the American public” and possesses “great audacity.” And not to believe Obama’s election will have “enormous effect” on the streets of Cairo, or Nairobi, or Jerusalem is “naive.” We were dealing, after all, with a tranformational president unlike any in our lifetime. …
Gateway Pundit posts on the “Jobs Bash” that will crash today’s birthday party in Chicago.
The Economist reports on social scientists who take a stab at understanding human’s gene for altruism.
THE extraordinary success of Homo sapiens is a result of four things: intelligence, language, an ability to manipulate objects dexterously in order to make tools, and co-operation. Over the decades the anthropological spotlight has shifted from one to another of these as the prime mover of the package, and thus the fundament of the human condition. At the moment co-operation is the most fashionable subject of investigation. In particular, why are humans so willing to collaborate with unrelated strangers, even to the point of risking being cheated by people whose characters they cannot possibly know?
Evidence from economic games played in the laboratory for real money suggests humans are both trusting of those they have no reason to expect they will ever see again, and surprisingly unwilling to cheat them—and that these phenomena are deeply ingrained in the species’s psychology. …