posted July 23, 2011 10:43 AM            

Lame Duck President
by Sarah Palin on Friday
July 22, 2011 at 7:11pm

After listening to the President’s press conference today, let’s keep in mind the following:

This is the same president who proposed an absurdly irresponsible budget that would increase our debt by trillions of dollars, and whose party failed to even put forward a budget in over 800 days! This is the same president who is pushing our country to the brink because of his reckless spending on things like the nearly trillion dollar “stimulus” boondoggle. This is the same president who ignored his own debt commission’s recommendations and demonized the voices of fiscal sanity who proposed responsible plans to reform our entitlement programs and rein in our dangerous debt trajectory. This is the same president who wanted to push through an increase in the debt ceiling that didn’t include any cuts in government spending! This is the same president who wants to slam Americans with tax hikes to cover his reckless spending, but has threatened to veto a bill proposing a balanced budget amendment. This is the same president who hasn’t put forward a responsible plan himself, but has rejected reasonable proposals that would tackle our debt. This is the same president who still refuses to understand that the American electorate rejected his big government agenda last November. As I said in Madison, Wisconsin, at the Tax Day Tea Party rally, “We don’t want it. We can’t afford it. And we are unwilling to pay for it.”

Now the President is outraged because the GOP House leadership called his bluff and ended discussions with him because they deemed him an obstruction to any real solution to the debt crisis.

He has been deemed a lame duck president. And he is angry now because he is being treated as such.

His foreign policy strategy has been described as “leading from behind.” Well, that’s his domestic policy strategy as well. Why should he be surprised that he’s been left behind in the negotiations when he’s been leading from behind on this debt crisis?

Thank you, GOP House leaders. Please don’t get wobbly on us now.

2012 can’t come soon enough.

posted July 23, 2011 11:42 AM            

The concessions that the President has offered are still far more than the original deal. Revenue from the millionaires and Billionairs does not fly with Sir John of Orange.

posted July 23, 2011 11:48 AM            

and watch the economy go down as the stimulus money runs out and all those jobs SAVED by it become unemployment figures. people talk as if government jobs didn't put money INTO the economy, through consumer spending AND taxes on the income, and that it is wasteful to keep them.

posted July 23, 2011 12:02 PM            

quote:

---

if our tax money isn't used to help keep us going, what ARE we paying for?

---

I really do not like the spin-word "entitlements"

why are subsidies not a larger entitlement.

We pay into S.S. and Medicare every blessed week, yet they are entitlements!

posted July 23, 2011 03:25 PM            

O'Bomber has NO plan, Reid has NO plan and the discussions with Boehner had...I say HAD reached a point where Boehner was going to try to sell 800 Billion in new revenue to the House. The next day, O'Bomber raised the ante and demanded an additional 400 Billion.

Further, the spending reductions were to take place over a 10 year time frame with little spending reduction NOW.

There is a rule some should get familiar with. Today's Congress cannot bind future Congresses. So, spending cuts scheduled for future years tend to just disappear from the legislative scene.

Imagine the mindset of those who say reducing spending to reflect tax revenues...IS EXTREME.

Imagine the mindset of those who say capping spending to a reasonable and historic percentage of the Gross Domestic Product...IS EXTREME.

Imagine the mindset of those who say requiring the federal government to balance it's spending each year with it's revenues...IS EXTREME.

But, that's exactly what President Lame-Duck and the demoscat Socialist Knuckleheads in Congress DO SAY!

Btw, those so called subsidies for oil companies and jet aircraft...were put into the O'BomberStimulus by O'Bomber and the demoscats. Republicans didn't vote for them...demoscats DID.

Just thought you'd like to know all that since it's clear you don't...or you wouldn't be making the kinds of comments you are.

posted July 23, 2011 04:19 PM            

figures, doesn't it?

posted July 23, 2011 05:24 PM            

Businesses are not spending US taxpayer money when they overspend...O'Bomber and his Socialist congressional comrades ARE.

If businesses overspend and cannot make their debt payments...along with everything else, their credit gets cut off by lenders and they go out of business.

Americans are in favor of the government running it's operations just like citizens must do AND like every state in the US, except for 1...must do.

There's no way the O'Bomber administration could actually look worse than they already do.

Americans favor the Republican Cut, Cap and Balance plan passed by the House, by a 66% majority across all demographic lines.

O'Bomber and his Socialist comrades in the Senate just told Americans to stuff it yesterday when they voted to table the House bill without any discussion whatsoever.

posted July 23, 2011 10:56 PM            

So, what I said earlier about what derailed the talks between O'Bomber and Boehner is true.

Boehner decided O'Bomber wasn't a reliable negotiating partner when O'Bomber attempted to up the ante after Boehner thought they had an agreement. Any kind of tax increase would be a hard sell in the Republican House but Boehner was willing to make the attempt...until O'Bomber demanded an additional 400bn over the already agreed 800bn.

Then there's O'Bomber braying that he's the adult in the room but he's the one who really derailed the talks by reneging on the agreement.

Boehner derails tax increase, Obama’s 2012 plan
Published: 12:05 AM 07/23/2011 | Updated: 9:56 AM 07/23/2011
By Neil Munro

President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign ran off the rails today when GOP leaders refused his last-minute demand for $400 billion in tax increases, instead announcing their intention to negotiate a plan with Senate Democrats......

But the dramatic and last-minute failure of the talks may gravely marginalize Obama’s claims of being a post-partisan fiscal moderate. If the Republicans craft a fallback deal with the Senate, it would sideline the president and embolden Republican legislators and Tea Party supporters........

Boehner refused to agree to tax increases that Obama demanded at the last minute. The increases amounted to $400 billion, Boehner said. (Obama: I’ve been left at the altar)

posted July 26, 2011 05:49 PM            

IRS. gov

posted July 27, 2011 12:15 AM            

Left, Right, Polls Agree: Obama Is Flubbing It
Tuesday, 26 Jul 2011 01:47 PM
By David A. Patten

Pundits across the political spectrum agree: President Barack Obama has committed a series of strategic blunders during debt-ceiling negotiations that have hurt his credibility on the issue, they say, leaving him out in the cold as Congress cuts a deal.

On Monday, Obama took to the airwaves during prime time once again to try to position himself as the voice of moderation on the issue.

“Either way, I have told leaders of both parties that they must come up with a fair compromise in the next few days that can pass both houses of Congress — a compromise I can sign,” Obama said.

But despite the centrist focus that the president is counting on to help him win back disaffected independent voters, he appears to be taking a serious drubbing in the polls. The Gallup weekly average shows his approval rating slipping to 43 percent, tying the lowest weekly number of his presidency.

Even worse numbers arrived for the administration Tuesday, courtesy of a new ABC News/Washington Post poll that suggests even the president’s base is jumping ship. The percentage of Americans angry about the economy has jumped from 44 percent to 60 percent.

Among liberal Democrats, support for Obama’s job-creation efforts has crashed from 53 percent to 31 percent. Almost 60 percent of voters now disapprove of Obama’s overall management of the economy, according to that poll.

“More than a third of Americans now believe that President Obama’s policies are hurting the economy, and confidence in his ability to create jobs is sharply eroding among his base,” reports the Post.

How much the debt-ceiling talks have contributed to the deterioration of the president’s standing with voters is an open question. But New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin reports that analysts are turning a deaf ear to the administration’s drumbeat warnings of an impending financial doomsday.

“They have lost all credibility,” Neil M. Barofsky, former inspector-general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, told Sorkin. “It’s so typical of the way Treasury and the Fed treat everything — it is always to warn that Armageddon is coming.”

It now appears that Obama is out of options, his only choice being whether to sign whatever debt-ceiling deal Congress sends him, or risk shutting down the government.

“The administration may have made a strategic mistake in warning too soon that the market would react negatively,” Sorkin writes in Tuesday’s Times. “It ultimately undercuts the government’s negotiating position because the doomsday scenario has not played out, even though the deadline is fast approaching.”

Pundits from the left and the right are criticizing the president for continuing to call Monday night for a “balanced approach” involving both revenue increases and spending cuts. Neither of the two plans under consideration — the “cut, cap, and balance” plan passed in the House and the plan that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid proposed in the Senate — has any provision to increase taxes.

“It was a speech entirely divorced from reality,” wrote conservative Washington Post writer Jennifer Rubin. “The Senate Democrats can’t pass tax hikes. The grand bargain can’t get through the Congress with jumbo tax hikes. It is he who rejected a deal that had the agreement of House and Senate leaders. You have to wonder why he set the bar so high.

“He’ll face the flood of ‘President Capitulates!’ headlines when it doesn’t come about,” she continued. “But the answer lies in the sole and consuming passion of this White House: reelection. Hence, the class warfare and the excuse-mongering.”

The president Monday objected that “nothing is asked of those at the top of the income scales.” But syndicated columnist Patrick J. Buchanan, who served as senior adviser to three presidents and ran for the office himself on three occasions, took the president to task for still talking about tax revenues when none is being considered.

“That is yesterday! There aren’t going to be any tax increases,” Buchanan said Tuesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

“The president has been benched, basically,” Buchanan said. “He’s out of the process except as the final individual who’s either going to veto us into default or not. You’re going to get an increase in the debt ceiling. I thought [House Speaker John] Boehner was far more realistic, far more grounded in reality.”

Even Newsweek Editor in Chief Tina Brown remarked that Obama “did seem kind of retro in the sense the whole tax situation was off the table anyway, so why was he saying that again?”

Among the strategic miscalculations that Obama’s critics on both the left and right now say he made:

He transparently painted doomsday scenarios to try to pressure Congress into making a deal he liked. His suggestion that Social Security checks might not go out, for example, never appeared probable under any scenario. Obama warned again Monday of dire repercussions, despite the collective shrug Wall Street has given the impasse so far. “We would risk sparking a deep economic crisis, this one caused almost entirely by Washington,” he said.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s Aug. 2 deadline for normal government funding to cut off was never verifiable. Sorkin reports that “the market seems to believe it was a false deadline.” PIMCO chief Mohamed El-Erian has declared, “The Aug. 2 deadline is not as hard as indicated by Secretary Geithner.”

The president repeatedly portrayed House Republicans as intransigent. But the White House reportedly agreed with Speaker Boehner to a deal including $800 billion in new tax revenues, then subsequently upped the ante and demanded $400 billion more. “The White House negotiating process was inadequate,” New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote Tuesday. “Neither the president nor the House speaker ever wrote down and released their negotiating positions. Everything was mysterious, shifting and slippery.”

The president’s histrionic speech on Friday, in which he portrayed himself as being “left at the altar” by Republicans, appears to have backfired. “Obama never should have gone in front of the cameras just minutes after the talks faltered Friday evening,” writes Brooks. “His appearance was suffused with that ‘I’m the only mature person in Washington’ condescension that drives everybody else crazy.” After those remarks, Brooks said, Democrats and Republicans decided to take over and work around rather than through Obama, and began negotiating with each other directly.
Throughout the budget and debt-ceiling crisis, Obama appeared to approach the issues more as a politician trying to protect his maneuvering room, rather than as a leader presenting a plan in a bid to persuade others to come on board. This ultimately left the resolution of the crisis up to Congress, while Obama stood on the sidelines and lectured both sides on what they should do.

posted July 27, 2011 09:29 AM            

Just how far to the left Obama's politics can veer is a topic that has not been limited to domestic spectators. Two years ago, Hugo Chavez famously quipped about Obama, "Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to right." Whether or not Obama's politics are left of a self-described socialist's or Communist's is open to debate, but one thing has become certain -- Obama now finds himself well to the left of his party.

Only too perfectly timed with Nevada businessman and campaign contributor Steve Wynn's comments last week that lambasted Obama's attack-politics against the wealthy, Senator Harry Reid has distanced himself from Obama. And Reid would have good reason to jump ship in the wake of these comments. Wynn saying that "this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, progress and job creation in my lifetime" probably carries some weight to his constituents. Americans are deeply concerned about job creation, and where Wynn has applied his own means in Nevada to be very successful in this area, Obama and Reid have applied everyone else's means to miserably fail.

So Harry Reid circumvented Obama's influence, and worked directly with House Speaker John Boehner to discuss a possible proposal that accomplishes the tasks of cutting long-term spending while avoiding immediate default and the inevitable credit correction that would follow. As a result, a Congressional resolution between the Senate and House may now be possible. But notably missing from this agreement is the repeal of the Bush era tax cuts and the elimination of certain deductions for wealthy Americans making over $200K annually.

Barack Obama doesn't appear to like the omission, and in a speech made at the White House on Monday night, he refused to acknowledge that the talks even took place by declaring negotiations to be in a dangerous stalemate. (This is a claim that House Speaker Boehner immediately refuted) Obama expressed his distaste for any deal that would not include a tax hike for the rich and regurgitated his slander against corporate jet owners, hedge fund managers, "millionaires and billionaires," and said that they have to "pay their fair share" because families are sitting around their dinner tables each night, nervously counting on Washington to seize and appropriate more of their money to secure everyone else's Social Security, Medicare, military checks, and college tuitions.

With all the variety of watching a one-trick-pony, America watched as our president used what could be his last chips to double-down on "social justice" and the redistribution of American wealth.

Justin Ruben of MoveOn.org has offered that Americans are frustrated by the budget debate, and that the partisan battle is like a "bizarro parallel universe." I would have to agree, but probably for different reasons. There's certainly something bizarre in a world view suggesting that the wealthiest 10% of Americans paying 68% of the national tax burden is not paying their "fair share," especially when over 45% of Americans pay no share at all. But that's just the tip of the iceberg where Obama's fiscal delusion is concerned. In his speech, he stated that "In the year 2000, the government had a budget surplus. But instead of using it to pay off our debt, the money was spent on trillions of dollars in new tax cuts."

Think about what this statement actually implies. Our president just suggested that allowing taxpayers to keep more of their own money equates to "spending" the government's money. Yet when he legislated a massive entitlement program that allows artists to quit their day-jobs and collect healthcare on the taxpayer dime, he claimed to be "saving" taxpayer money. It's as if the hard-lined left lives in a backward financial reality where spending taxpayer money is actually saving it, and not taking taxpayer money away equates to irresponsibly spending it. A reality where one American citizen paying a lot and getting little in return while another American citizen paying nothing and getting a lot in return is all as fair as fair can be. And if you can blindly believe all of that, as some of Obama's more extremist followers do, you probably have no problem believing that up is down, that left is right, or that right is invariably wrong.

This understandably makes the left's rhetoric surrounding the debt crisis a little confusing to follow, but not because Americans are too dumb to get it or because we have never heard of a debt ceiling before, which was Obama's latest insult to Americans' intelligence on Monday night. It's just doesn't make any sense in the real world that we Americans live in. It only makes sense to extreme progressives.

This highlights the incredible irony in Obama's speech. He offered to independents that "some Republicans" are extremists and a hindrance to bipartisan resolution, yet his extreme adherence to the core tenets of progressivism are, in actuality, the most daunting hurdle to be faced in the coming days. We have to seriously ask ourselves, if the fiscal doomsday is upon us in a matter of days as Obama claims, why would he purposefully throw a monkey wrench into promising and time-sensitive bipartisan negotiation that could avert it? Are American interests in his mind, or are his hard-lined socialistic roots too deep to budge from his clearly partisan agenda?

posted July 31, 2011 10:44 AM            

Having massively increased the country’s debt, President Barack Obama now has no plan to offer Congress to fix the crisis.

Instead, he has been pointing fingers of blame at Republicans and the wealthy, who already pay nearly half the country’s taxes.

This is perfectly consistent with Obama’s presidency. When he was White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel kept referring in an ABC interview to the goals of getting healthcare costs under control and creating an energy policy that frees America from dependence on foreign oil.

However, when pressed for details on implementing these goals, Emanuel repeated, “We set the goals,” as if that were an end unto itself.

Early on, we saw Obama’s approach when he announced that he would close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp within a year. He then began to look into where the prisoners should go.

In pushing for a stimulus bill, Obama announced how much he wanted to spend and how many new jobs he wanted to create. Then he left it to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to decide how the money should be spent.

Obama took the same approach with the healthcare bill, letting Democrats in Congress come up with a plan that is already increasing healthcare costs and will increase the wait to see a doctor.

While engaging in a spending spree of trillions of dollars, he claimed his budgets move America “from an era of borrow and spend” to “save and invest.” Yet under Obama, the federal debt has risen from 53 percent of GDP in 2009 to 72 percent this year.

Obama proclaimed his desire to end divisiveness and to govern in a bipartisan manner. After listening to Republican approaches to stimulating the economy, he ignored almost all of them.

Instead, he revived the divisiveness of the past by constantly bashing the Bush administration and releasing memos about enhanced interrogation, redacting the details of the plots that were successfully rolled up as a result of those techniques.

We see the same pattern with Obama’s approach to foreign affairs. Obama called for “a world without nuclear weapons” without demonstrating that he has any inkling of how that might be achieved.

Obama’s lack of follow-through is why only one of the measures he sponsored as a U.S. senator was enacted: a bill to “promote relief, security, and democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Obama's penchant for blaming the country’s problems on the wealthy mirrors the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., his former minister and self-described mentor.

posted August 01, 2011 09:04 AM            

Having done that and then failing to negotiate the debt limit deal in good faith, the Speaker of the House turned to his legislative counterpart and hammered out the "deal".

It's instructive to note that the deal coming down the pike looks nothing like O'Bomber and demoscats wanted. We've just had a national discussion on subjects demoscats didn't want to talk about..out of control federal spending, cutting federal spending, capping federal spending and a balanced budget amendment. 2 of those subjects made it into the debt limit deal.

The Ground Has Shifted Under Obama's Feet
Wynton C. Hall
08/01/2011

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.
–Barack Obama

No matter what happens with the eventual debt ceiling deal, one thing is certain: the political ground has now shifted under President Obama’s feet, and he and his strategists have yet to realize how seismic the shift has been.

Just listen to how furious and frustrated U.S. senators have become. “The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent,” fumed one senator. "I can only imagine the anger and disgust they [voters] have at witnessing a broken government and a president and members of Congress who can't seem to even agree sometimes on what day it is, let alone to solve the nation's debt crisis," complained another. And yet another groused, “We are watching him [Obama] turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.”

Are these the words of conservative Senator Jim DeMint, Pat Toomey, or Republican rock star Senator Marco Rubio? No, the three angst-riddled quotes above come from Democratic senators, not Republicans.

And here’s why. Zoom back and view the current debt ceiling debacle with a panoramic lens and consider how the aftermath is going to play in the public’s mind. Imagine for a moment that Mr. Obama were able to get everything he wants in the ensuing debt limit plan, his own perfect progressive spending spree fantasyland made true. What will he have won? What will he have accomplished in the minds of voters? The privilege of declaring that he, not his political opponents, exhibited the “courageous leadership” necessary to drag the nation farther out into the deepest and most dangerous economic waters the country has ever voyaged? What will he brag? That he beat the GOP to the punch in shackling our children and grandchildren with even more debt owed to China?

That’s hardly cause for a celebratory victory lap.

Indeed, how does a president claim credit for “winning the future” as he plunges the nation deeper into the financial abyss? That’s like a broke person cheering because he convinced his credit card company to increase his spending limit despite the fact that he already maxed out his card by buying a fleet of Ferraris. And for this the president and his advisers believe Mr. Obama will gain voters’ gratitude and adulation? Something tells me that’s a fight the Republican National Committee is more than happy to have.

But it gets worse—much worse—for Mr. Obama moving forward now. Because he has allowed the debt ceiling debate to become a dramatic race against the clock, Mr. Obama has positioned himself as the “sideline sitter president” who is weak and ineffectual. The average person looks at the mess in Washington and says, “Who’s in charge? How did it get to this point? Why hasn’t this been fixed and dealt with already?” In each instance, the answer is that the president has failed to lead and get the work done.

Mr. Obama recently went on national television and declared that the debt ceiling disaster is a “three-ring-circus.” But what he and his advisers have failed to grasp is that he is the ring leader. When it comes to the public’s perception of the nation’s fiscal health, the buck stops with the president. Period.

But perhaps most injurious of all to the president is what the debt ceiling fiasco —and Mr. Obama’s concomitant bungling of it—has done to his broader argument about government’s effectiveness in solving vexing social problems and its ability to engineer human flourishing, a view that is as far to the left as any American president in U.S. history has ever dared to veer. Voters look at the meltdown in Washington and say to themselves, “The president can’t even figure out how to pay our nation’s bills? And now he wants me to give him four more years and even more control over my life? Ha! Get real and get lost!”

Presidential leadership and the public’s stomach for ever-expanding government are twinned; as the former sours, the latter does too. After all, when Apple has more cash than the U.S. government, how can a progressive president argue that government should be granted more power and influence in solving the nation’s dire economic problems?

It can’t.

The political ground has shifted beneath the president’s feet in ways he and his campaign advisers have yet to comprehend. Come November 2012, they’ll finally get it.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=45234

posted August 01, 2011 11:02 AM            

quote:

---

DO NOT COMMAND the branch of government which writes the laws.

---

Hey! Stop with the nonsense already. If what Obama did was "commanding" Congress to do something, the precedent was established WELL before him.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, struggling to break a fiscal logjam, urged Democratic and Republican leaders Tuesday to put aside political posturing and pass a crucial bill to increase the legal limit for the federal debt.

Bush's letter is the latest, most pointed warning from the administration that if the debt-limit increase is not approved by the end of the week, the government risks an unprecedented default on payments to holders of government bonds. http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jun/26/nation/na-debt

Any American citizen has a right to call upon Congress to do their job; President included.

Reagan delivered a message of "push, push, push" to get a budget before Aug. 2, when Congress begins a monthlong recess, said Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.). http://articles.latimes.com/1985-07-24/news/mn-4700_1_dole

posted August 01, 2011 12:35 PM            

and it's patently obvious that he is not the commanding type, in fact if he were bossier he just might have avoided this whole circus...

however he keeps meeting them more than halfway only to have rush and co. claim he "has no plan"

the left consider him a wimp

and the compromises keep coming.

posted August 01, 2011 01:05 PM            

I see you still haven't healed your definitions deficiency acoustic.

Yes, Bush "urged" leades to come together but O'Bomber attempted to command congress...and John Boehner handed O'Bomber his head for doing so...hey, listen up bub, Congress writes the laws. You get to decide which ones to sign. When we need something signed into law, we'll send it to you.

posted August 01, 2011 01:47 PM            

Bush said in his weekly radio address. "Members of Congress must put political theater behind them, fix the AMT and protect America's middle class from an unfair tax hike."

"Congress should not use legislation that millions of Americans are counting on to protect them from higher taxes in one area as an excuse to raise taxes in other areas," Bush said.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/17/politics/main3517565.shtml

Two very clear demands/commands for Congress.

“The intelligence community must be able to tell me that the bill Congress sends to my desk will allow this vital [CIA] program to continue.” In an attempt to politically blackmail the Senate opponents of his bill—including four prominent Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee—Bush declared that unless the Senate agreed to his “clarification,” i.e., evisceration, of Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions, he would close down the CIA interrogation program. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/sep2006/bush-s16.shtml

posted August 01, 2011 05:08 PM            

nd LO AND BEHOLD a plan has been hashed out WITH obama's input...we shall see if the senate moves it forward shan't we?

talk about blither blather and bloviate, as i said last week we KNOW they were going to move forward despite all the stench...

posted August 10, 2011 04:15 PM            

President Obama achieved the historic downgrading of America's credit rating the old-fashioned way. He earned it.

He came into office with federal spending already near an historic peak, with a percent of GDP at 20.7 percent and having increased by one-seventh during the Bush years. One year earlier Bush had joined with then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to enact a pointless Keynesian stimulus package of $168 billion, which the record will show created exactly 0.00 jobs, and stimulated nothing but national debt.

Send In the Clowns

Barack Obama​ surveyed the continuing wreckage of the financial crisis, and decided to follow the advice of the reknowned economist Otter, "who famously said in 'Animal House​,' this situation 'absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part,'" as quoted by Andy Kessler in Monday's Wall Street Journal.

Barack Obama provided that gesture in the form of the nearly $1 trillion Keynesian stimulus package, which, though five times as big as Bush-Pelosi, still created exactly 0.00 jobs.

But that was just the beginning. President Obama went on to lead the nation to a mercurial increase in federal spending of 28 percent in his first three years alone. Then, after the nation's voters repudiated these policies with an historic New Deal-sized shellacking in the 2010 elections, President Obama repudiated the voters with his historic proposed 2012 budget in February 2011.

That budget proposed to increase federal spending by another 57 percent by 2021, ensuring that President Obama would increase the national debt by more in just one term in office than all other Presidents in American history combined.

On the course set by that budget, America's national debt as a percent of GDP is set to smash through the all-time record set during World War II​, rocket right on through the level suffered by Greece when it fell into national bankruptcy, and keep right on rocketing into the unchartered stratosphere.

President Obama realized he had fallen behind the political curve when the adult in the room, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, proposed a budget instead that would not only lead to a balanced budget, but would ultimately pay off the national debt, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office. And then the Republican-controlled House passed it.

So President Obama did what he does best. He gave a speech. On April 13, he demanded still more tax increases, on top of the sweeping tax increases he already has enacted in current law for 2013, to finance his runaway spending increases. When House Budget Adult Paul Ryan asked the Democrat-appointed CBO Director Doug Ehlmendorf if he had scored President Obama's April 13 proposals, Ehlmendorf replied in exasperation that the CBO doesn't score speeches.

For political atmospherics before the 2010 election, the President appointed his own debt commission, with great fanfare. When the commission reported a debt and deficit reduction plan in December after the election that rightly proposed to cut spending and tax rates, with tax reform, the President ignored it and took no steps to implement any of its recommendations. Instead he proposed the public policy malpractice 2012 budget discussed above, which kicked the proposals of his own commission to the curb.

When Tea Party Republicans tried to impose some spending discipline on Obama in the debt limit fight, President Obama laid on the negotiating table all of $2 billion in spending cuts, which is the equivalent of cutting one penny out of every $20 in federal spending. So all year long leading up to the credit downgrade (despite record setting federal spending, deficits and debt) President Obama effectively refused to cut spending at all, proposing instead still more tax increases, on the road to doubling federal taxes and spending relative to the economy.

Tea Party to the Rescue

The Tea Party-dominated Republican House majority already acted in the spring to completely solve the debt crisis by passing the Ryan budget, with $6.2 trillion in cuts in the first ten years alone. Despite President Obama's unreasoned rhetoric, that budget was carefully crafted so no one would actually suffer as a result of those cuts. Sure some people would lose government windfalls and those who are able, in time, would have to pay for more themselves. But that is exactly what we need right now.

If Senate Democrats and the Obama Administration had acted to implement that Ryan budget, then there would have been no debt downgrade. But instead they responded with unreasoned derision, running an ad that showed Ryan throwing an elderly woman over a cliff, even though his reforms would not apply to anyone over 55 today. That ad itself contributed to last Friday's debt downgrade, showing Washington unreasoned and unwilling to address the problem.

Then during the debt limit debate in July, the Tea Party-dominated Republican House acted to completely solve the debt crisis yet again, passing the Cut, Cap and Balance Act of 2011. It cut government spending for fiscal year 2012 (which starts on October 1, 2011) by $111 billion -- a modest, reasonable slice of Obama's projected spending of $3,729 billion ($3.7 trillion). It also adopted a cap on total federal spending that would reduce it to the long run, postwar, historical average of 20 percent of GDP by 2017.

The Act provided as well for President Obama​'s requested increase in the debt limit, if Congress first passes a specified Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution and sends it to the states for ratification. That Amendment would require Congress to balance the budget every year except in a wartime emergency once it became effective. That would mean that the federal government would have no legal authority for increased borrowing except under the wartime procedures specified in the Amendment.

That Balanced Budget Amendment would also include a supermajority requirement to raise taxes. That means no tax increase could be enacted without a vote of 67 percent in favor in each house. The Constitutional Amendment also specifies a cap on federal spending equal to 19.9 percent of GDP, limiting federal spending to the long-term average for the past 70 years.

But once again the Democrat-controlled Senate failed to even consider the measure, and President Obama laughed it off. Standard and Poors (S&P), however, wasn't laughing. After downgrading the credit rating for U.S. debt from the AAA rating that has prevailed since President Washington, S&P said publicly that Cut, Cap and Balance would have avoided the downgrade.

The debt limit downgrade and the reaction of the markets since then shows that the Tea Party Republicans were right all along in calling for the above measures, and passing them through the House. Trying to blame the Tea Party for the debt downgrade, like the wildly unreasoned President Obama and other Democrat pirates are now trying to do, is like blaming Jenny Craig for obesity in America. The fault lies entirely with President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Senate, who failed to take any action on the measures to completely solve the problem that the House already passed. S&P and the markets have thoroughly vindicated the Tea Party position.

President Obama's Disgrace

After the historic debt downgrade on Friday, President Obama addressed the nation on Monday. He would have done better to follow Glenn Beck​'s advice on his radio show earlier in the day: "Shut up, Mr. President."

While the President was talking, blaming everyone but himself, threatening the nation with further crippling tax increases, and further demonstrating that America suffered a President who was only interested in political advantage rather than solving the crisis, the stock market dropped another 200 points, finishing the day down 631. It was one of the worst days in stock market history.

The President said, "So it's not a lack of plans or policies that's the problem here. It's a lack of political will in Washington. It's the insistence on drawing lines in the sand, a refusal to put what's best for the country ahead of self-interest or party or ideology."

This is another example of Obama's political misdirection and even calculated deception. Throughout his entire presidency, Obama has done nothing but refuse to put what's best for the country ahead of what he sees as his own political self-interest. He consistently refused to cut spending -- until the Tea Party forced quite modest cuts on him as part of the debt limit deal -- and he has continued to promote still more tax rate increases. But it is an old Saul Alinsky trick, straight out of Rules for Radicals​, to accuse your opponents of exactly what you are doing. And Obama during his "community organizer" days was one of the nation's leading experts and tutors on Alinsky.

Indeed, in Monday's speech, Obama called for still more tax increases "that will ask those who can afford it to pay their fair share." I am beginning to think that Obama does not even understand the tax code he is administering. Or maybe he really is a Marxist infiltrator who thinks the economy will be just fine if he outright loots all the nation's investors, employers, and small businesses.

Before President Obama was even elected, official IRS data for 2007 showed that the top one percent of income earners already paid more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95 percent of income earners combined. The top one percent paid 40.4 percent of their income taxes for that year (almost twice their share of income). The bottom 40 percent of income earners as a group paid no federal income taxes that year. They instead received net payments from the IRS equal to four percent of total federal tax revenues.

The last time America balanced the budget, in the late 1990s, House Speaker Newt Gingrich and President Clinton did it entirely with spending cuts and no tax increases. Indeed, tax rates were cut to spur economic growth. Clinton and Gingrich enacted the largest capital gains tax cut in U.S. history, slashing the rate from 28 to 20 percent. Along with some other tax cuts on capital, that helped to promote an economic boom that produced surging revenues.

The Republican Congress​ then cut federal discretionary spending from 1995 to 1996 by 5.4 percent in real dollars, after adjusting for inflation. As a percent of GDP, federal discretionary spending, including defense and non-defense, was slashed by 17.5 percent in just four years, from 1995 to 1999.

The Congress also adopted some entitlement reform. The AFDC welfare program was terminated as an entitlement, and sent back to the states with work requirements and federal financing in fixed, finite block grants. Agricultural subsidies were phased out under the Freedom to Farm reforms (later reversed under House Speaker Dennis Hastert). President Clinton deserves credit for going along with these Congressional Republican reforms.

As a result, $200 billion annual federal deficits (which had prevailed for over 15 years) were transformed into surpluses by 1998, peaking at $236 billion by 2000. The national debt was reduced by $560 billion in surpluses from 1998 to 2001.

But don't expect the Obama Administration to understand any of this. With all of the serious economists Obama has had working for him, policy is set by the President himself, in consultation only with his campaign manager David Plouffe​.

Tea Party Washington

Given the debt downgrade, the market reaction, and the wretched economy, Tea Party Republicans need to understand that they now enjoy the upper hand. Only their policies have credibility on jobs. Proceeding with the Super Committee in the next debt limit round due for completion by the end of the year, Republicans must be aggressive in what they demand.

The Ryan budget included more than enough spending cuts to provide for sweeping, pro-growth tax reform, again as scored by CBO. The same was true of Cut, Cap and Balance. Indeed, the Ryan budget already provided for corporate tax reform reducing the federal rate to 25 percent, and individual tax reform reducing the individual rates to 25 percent for those making over $100,000 per year and to 15 percent for those making less, with generous personal exemptions exempting low and moderate income workers from any tax.

Republicans must demand no less as the price for their agreement in the next debt limit round. If President Obama and the Democrats refuse, Republicans should let the automatic cuts go into effect and take their case to the people in 2012. The cuts can be adjusted as necessary and replaced with much bigger ones after that election.

http://spectator.org/archives/2011/08/10/obama-downgraded/