Obama Is Wrong
The Spending Cannot Continue
Posted: February 21, 2013
President Obama apparently takes the American people for fools. Otherwise, he wouldn’t speak as he did Tuesday on the looming sequester, or engage in shameless demagoguery while doing so.
While we hardly deem an $85 billion spending reduction — a mere three cents of every dollar spent — the equivalent of taking a “meat cleaver” to the budget, sequestration is hardly our preferred way of trimming the fat from a bloated federal government. We would use a scalpel, and wield it far more judiciously, particularly in the arena of national defense. Still, it behooves one to recall that, in 2011, the White House endorsed sequestration as an approach, an inconvenient fact Mr. Obama would like the nation to overlook.
Thus, we have a case of “Who’s kidding whom?” When the president, fresh off a three-day golfing holiday, addressed the sequestration issue anew Tuesday, he did so with the increasingly standard array of living props — in this case, first responders — arrayed behind him. He need not have bothered to call on these folks. His message — that Republicans would just as soon see community safety compromised than have the wealthy pay their “fair share” — would have been abundantly clear without the window dressing.
Mr. Obama’s strategy is no less direct than his rhetoric. Assuming a compliant populace, the president is engaging in a high-stakes game of “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” with his opponents. Either Republicans acquiesce to his stated need for more “revenue” — another tax increase and, thus, another repudiation of principles once dearly held — or he’ll gladly let sequestration take effect, and pin all blame for the pain on the GOP.
Republicans, for the moment at least, appear to be holding firm. Yes, they would like to see “tax reform” initiated, but not merely as a vehicle to provide more money to a government spending wildly beyond its means.
“The American people understand that the revenue debate is now closed,” House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday in response to the president. “Tax reform is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to boost job creation in America. It should not be squandered to enable more Washington spending. Spending is the problem, spending must be the focus.”
Precisely. And for this reason, the GOP leadership, as soon as lawmakers return to Washington next week, should counter Mr. Obama’s demagoguery — that, unless Republicans agree to more taxes, the common weal, not to mention the economy, is imperiled — with a keenly delineated spending reduction plan of its own. The GOP has no choice but to fight such hyperbolic (and increasingly prosaic) scare tactics with reason.
Reason, after all, resides in its corner. For, as Gretchen Hamel, executive director of the economic watchdog group Public Notice, wrote in a commentary for Investors Business Daily, “It’s clear that the big spending agenda of the last four years has not delivered on its promise ... In the longer term, we have nothing to fear from budget cuts. Continued overspending and a growing debt, however, would result in a ‘fiscal crisis’.”
That’s sobriety speaking, not the “partisan recklessness and ideological rigidity” to which Mr. Obama alluded in his remarks on Tuesday. But is the American populace, at this moment in time, sufficiently sober to recognize and then confront such a looming “crisis”? Or is it drunk on presidential scare-perbole?
While we hardly deem an $85 billion spending reduction — a mere three cents of every dollar spent — the equivalent of taking a “meat cleaver” to the budget, sequestration is hardly our preferred way of trimming the fat from a bloated federal government. We would use a scalpel, and wield it far more judiciously, particularly in the arena of national defense. Still, it behooves one to recall that, in 2011, the White House endorsed sequestration as an approach, an inconvenient fact Mr. Obama would like the nation to overlook.
Thus, we have a case of “Who’s kidding whom?” When the president, fresh off a three-day golfing holiday, addressed the sequestration issue anew Tuesday, he did so with the increasingly standard array of living props — in this case, first responders — arrayed behind him. He need not have bothered to call on these folks. His message — that Republicans would just as soon see community safety compromised than have the wealthy pay their “fair share” — would have been abundantly clear without the window dressing.
Mr. Obama’s strategy is no less direct than his rhetoric. Assuming a compliant populace, the president is engaging in a high-stakes game of “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” with his opponents. Either Republicans acquiesce to his stated need for more “revenue” — another tax increase and, thus, another repudiation of principles once dearly held — or he’ll gladly let sequestration take effect, and pin all blame for the pain on the GOP.
Republicans, for the moment at least, appear to be holding firm. Yes, they would like to see “tax reform” initiated, but not merely as a vehicle to provide more money to a government spending wildly beyond its means.
“The American people understand that the revenue debate is now closed,” House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday in response to the president. “Tax reform is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to boost job creation in America. It should not be squandered to enable more Washington spending. Spending is the problem, spending must be the focus.”
Precisely. And for this reason, the GOP leadership, as soon as lawmakers return to Washington next week, should counter Mr. Obama’s demagoguery — that, unless Republicans agree to more taxes, the common weal, not to mention the economy, is imperiled — with a keenly delineated spending reduction plan of its own. The GOP has no choice but to fight such hyperbolic (and increasingly prosaic) scare tactics with reason.
Reason, after all, resides in its corner. For, as Gretchen Hamel, executive director of the economic watchdog group Public Notice, wrote in a commentary for Investors Business Daily, “It’s clear that the big spending agenda of the last four years has not delivered on its promise ... In the longer term, we have nothing to fear from budget cuts. Continued overspending and a growing debt, however, would result in a ‘fiscal crisis’.”
That’s sobriety speaking, not the “partisan recklessness and ideological rigidity” to which Mr. Obama alluded in his remarks on Tuesday. But is the American populace, at this moment in time, sufficiently sober to recognize and then confront such a looming “crisis”? Or is it drunk on presidential scare-perbole?