Barack Obama led the debate over tax policy by saying that the Republicans were taking government hostage, but it would appear that he fingered the wrong crowd. For the first time in his presidency, Obama has actually made a large-scale bipartisan compromise. The “post partisan” president as he presented himself during his campaign, has finally dared to cross the line to put Americans first. Now, his radical left cronies are throwing a fit that he would dare put his future electoral hopes ahead of their malignant Marxist agenda.
Nancy Pelosi, a beaten sad looking soul, is attempting to hold onto the little remaining power she has for another few weeks. Her time has run out, though she plows ahead like the November elections were just a short nightmare that interrupted a long sleep. With her stubborn resistance to the bipartisan tax deal hammered out by the president and the GOP, she is essentially flipping-the-bird to the American people, and especially America’s small-business owners. And this is the woman Democrats want to lead them through the wilderness years of 2011-2012. It’s going to be a hard reelection for many of them. The editors of the Wall Street Journal write of Pelosi and her progressive clique that “their highest policy principle is to redistribute wealth and income. They want to punish the successful, no matter the economic damage.”
While Americans have been able to corral the president into a somewhat acceptable compromise on marginal tax rates, the president is still out to lunch when it comes to the issues facing the American people. It is unprecedented that a president could anger conservatives, independents and liberals all in the span of two years. What is he trying to do? Perhaps that’s the post-partisanship the president is talking about. Rather than holding on to the support of one group, he is going to anger them all equally.
The problem with Obama’s “bipartisanship,” is that he is going into it kicking and screaming. As Kimberley Strassel writes so well the president would “like the nation to know that he’d rather carve his own eye out with a blunt spoon,” rather than make the compromise on tax rates that he has signed on to. That’s why no one in conservative America is going to give the president anymore support than when he was installing a nationalize healthcare system. That makes him a lame duck with a one-world Marxist bent. Americans aren’t looking for Jimmy-Carter-lite, they’re looking for Reagan-redux.
Some liberals, like the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson still think the public is with them. Mr. Robinson apparently believes that Americans would have supported another top-down stimulus plan, rather than the bottom up extension of current tax rates. Like most liberals, Mr. Robinson lays the federal deficit at the feet of those who would refuse to pay higher taxes, not those who would spend the country’s money. What is it about liberals that makes them feel entitled to your money in the first place? Perhaps a lack of any real job experience is to blame. The real world business experience of the Obama team is almost non-existent.
The uber-liberal economist of the day, Paul Krugman lights up the pages of the New York Times in his own attempt to make the tax deal look like a win for the president. The position that Krugman & Co. on the left have laid out seems to be that “We want to balance the budget, but only if by doing so we can redistribute the nation’s wealth from the rich to poor.” That would seem to be the rationale behind their calls to raise taxes on those married couples earning more than $250,000 in a year and to keep them the same for Americans earning less. He insists these Americans are “rich” though he knows that such is not the case. Wealth arises from accumulated savings. An American family earning $350,000 while paying federal, state and local taxes, Medicare, and FICA while footing the bill for a couple children to go to college isn’t going to get very far down the road to wealth accumulation. I understand that any American earning $30,000/year rather than $350,000/year may find what I have written hard to embrace, and for good reason. It takes some running of the actual numbers to really see the picture. It takes many years of earning a lot more than $300,000/year to actually accumulate the wealth I presume Mr. Krugman is referring to. And, as a Nobel Prize winner, one would assume Mr. Krugman knows all this, so his arguments seem to be more politically motivated than based on actual facts.
On the other side of the aisle, Republicans are doing their best to squander the support they have gained over the past two years. As the new chairman of the appropriations committee, the GOP has chosen the “Prince of Pork,” Hal Rogers. “Why,” you may ask, “would the GOP make such a terrible mistake?” It’s no mistake, the GOP seems bent on a rerun of the Bush years, pork for all. There is one ray of hope though, the anti-spending hero of the House, Jeff Flake, will also be added to the committee. He will surely be looking out for you and me as he attempts to turn what is now known as the “Favor Factory,” into what he calls the “Cutting Committee.”
Happy Friday
Dick
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