As Capitol Hill negotiators prepare for another bumpy ride in the lead-up to the federal government’s scheduled default sometime next month when the U.S. hits the debt ceiling again, Democrats are having problems coming to grips with reality.
President Barack Obama summed up his side’s view in the onset of negotiations over the so-called “fiscal cliff,” explaining to House Speaker John Boehner that “we don’t have a spending problem.”
Never mind that the non-partisan Government Accountability Office and the President’s own bipartisan Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform both disagree with that laughable claim, the President himself used to make a habit of criticizing runaway spending.
In fact, it was only a few months ago that Obama was campaigning on a deficit reduction platform of $2.50 in cuts for every $1 in additional revenue. (Funny how liberals only seem to remember the tax-hike portion of Obama’s “mandate.”)
Yet, just days after the GOP signed off on a fiscal cliff deal that traded $1 in spending cuts for every $41 in tax increases, all the while increasing spending by $330 billion, President Obama demanded even more “balance” in future deficit reduction proposals.
If the deal Obama signed this month was unbalanced in favor of spending cuts and the pocketbooks of “millionaires and billionaires,” I’d hate to see what additional “balance” looks like in the Left’s Bizarro World. Forget Obama’s campaign pleas to return to Clinton-era tax rates. We now have the most progressive tax-code since 1979, when Jimmy Carter was president. And Obama wants the law to be even more progressive. (Cue ironic Obama-esque reference to the “failed policies of the past.”)
As if the President’s new found ignorance of the nation’s spending problems weren’t strange enough, Obama’s justification for ignoring the GOP in the coming debt ceiling debate is even more eccentric. According to him, it’s all Congress’s fault!
“One thing I will not compromise over is whether or not Congress should pay the tab for a bill they’ve already racked up,” exclaimed an assertive Obama in his weekly address.
Most former constitutional law professors are probably aware that any bill passed by Congress doesn’t become law without the President’s signature. That includes the President’s failed $831 billion stimulus bill (which cost more than the nearly decade-long war in Iraq). The $5.2 trillion in accumulated debt during the past four years also required Obama’s signature, whether he wants to admit it or not.
Ignore spending? Raise taxes on 77 percent of Americans? Refuse to speak to the other party? Doesn’t sound like the electoral mandate I observed in 2012. Then again, I live in the real world.
