Props to President Obama for going into the lions den
Neither Side "Won"
I have seen some snippets and read the entire transcript. It is far from the Obama triumph the yapping liberal lap dogs have portrayed it to be, but he is to be congratulated for standing in there and giving as good as he got. His rhetoric is brilliant and he can think on his feet. Get past they style, however, and there still is not much substance. Regardless, I wish we had less Lardball Talking Point Ping Pong and more Roll Up Your Sleeves Free Wheeling Conversations like this.
Paul Ryan asks a pointed question about spending:
The spending bills that you've signed into law, the domestic discretionary spending has been increased by 84 percent. You now want to freeze spending at this elevated beginning next year. This means that total spending in your budget would grow at 3/100ths of 1 percent less than otherwise. I would simply submit that we could do more and start now.The President Obfuscates by Shifting Blame:
I want to just push back a little bit on the underlying premise about us increasing spending by 84 percent.Notice he doesn't take issue with the scarily large numbers; he implicitly accepts them. He just denies it's his fault. He went on to intone the standard Keynesian caution against cutting spending during a recession.
The fact of the matter is, is that most of the increases in this year's budget, this past year's budget, were not as a consequence of policies that we initiated but instead were built in as a consequence of the automatic stabilizers that kick in because of this enormous recession.
What this is Really all About
Both parties use taxpayer funds to reward their constituencies. The GOP generally does this in a ham handed way, viz. Bush Administration Treasury Chief Hank Paulson hands over hundreds of billions in rescue funds to Goldman Sachs and the company (AIG) whose collapse would have spelled Goldman's demise. It is useful to note that Paulson was a Goldman Sachs man before he was a Bushman.
Progressives take a more artful approach
By standing up whole governmental departments that are permanently infested with union types and liberal activists (Labor, Education, USDA, EPA), Democrats (modern-day progressives) have established a permanent money spigot from your wallet to their favored groups. Government unions, and anyone getting government funds, are a natural Democrat constituency, and that's the goal. Those receiving government money are more inclined to view government budget cutters as stingy, sinful meanies.
A Neat Trick: Raise the Baseline
Obama and the democrats have built upon Bush's fiscal irresponsibility and ratcheted up the annual budget deficit baseline from around $500 billion to $1.4 trillion. Remember when a newly-elected President Obama said it was time to come clean on the "real" budget deficit numbers?
Both parties had been falsely keeping the numbers low by putting some spending "off budget." This off-budget trick made things pretty on the outside and rotten on the inside, since this spending still added to the national debt. Even I applauded this move by Obama.
But in the fog of budgetary war, Obama and congressional democrats yammered on about Bush's reckless spending, all the while cramming the budget full of goodies that reward liberal constituencies, creating a new baseline of $1.4 trillion. Now, any future budget cutting talks start at that number, not the old one. How crafty.
All government spending has a ratchet effect, meaning it never goes down. So once you insert a spending line into the budget, you can't get rid of it or reduce it without a special dispensation from God Himself, and it automatically increases each year with everything else in the budget.
How Health Care Fits In
This is also why we keep hearing the uber libs shouting that Democrats should just ram this health care bill through and fix it later. Issues like abortion, who gets free care and how it is paid for are all secondary.
The main objective is to get the multi-hundred billion dollar bureaucratic superstructure in place, manned by 100,000 government union bureaucrats. Once that is done and the money taps turned on, it would take a civil war to destroy this money wasting bureaucratic beast.
And who better to sell it all than a post-racial, post-partisan smooth talker. Clever, huh?
Go read the transcript
3 comments:
The fact that the health care bill is halted before it could be rammed through into law, gives me faith that there are reasonable, logical, rational members of government who still love their country and care for the American dream.
... I hope those last few who still care can ward off the throngs of brainwashed who are happy to hand their freedom over to "authority."
Obama is still, and always will be, a smooth talker, who can usually put a pretty nice sentence together most of the time, and deliver it with suave, persuasive dulcet tones.
Regardless of his dangerous policies, thug-like advisors and a general Marxist philosophy, you can't take the gift of gab away from this guy.
History suggests that the Roman emperor Nero was quite the accomplished lyre player ('fiddles' did not exist in the first century), and rumor persists that he played his 'fiddle' during a devastating fire that leveled much of Rome, caring not at all about the horrific damage raging all around him, but rather was immersed in his own pleasure.
If we let him, Barack Hussein Obama will likely do the same, calmly yakking and lecturing us with yet another professorial speech while our great American system collapses into chaos.
He comes off as a shady car salesman every time he speaks. There's nothing this man says that is believable. And we called Clinton slick.
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