It’s been a busy couple of days so I haven’t had time to write much; however, I did get chance to watch the President’s press conference on Wednesday. How bad was it? Well, when the senior political analyst for Time calls you a dick just imagine what conservatives thought. Obama’s straw man argument about sacrificing food safety because of tax breaks for corporate jets is beyond ludicrous. This week’s best quote comes from Charles Krauthammer.
He himself, as we just heard, said you can’t reduce the deficit to the levels we need without raising revenues. Then he talks about the [tax break for] corporate jets, which he mentioned not once but six times.
I did the math on this. If you collect the corporate jet tax every year for the next 5,000 years, you will cover one year of the debt that Obama has run up. One year.
To put it another way, if you started collecting that tax at the time of John the Baptist and you collected it every year — first in shekels and now in dollars — you wouldn’t be halfway to covering one year of the amount of debt that Obama has run up.
As for the other one, he mentions again and again, the oil depreciation tax break — if you collect that one for 700 years, you won’t cover a year of Obama deficits.
And then here’s my favorite. I worked it out in the car on the way here. If you collect the corporate jets and the oil tax together — get all the bad guys and the fat cats at once — and you collect it for 100 years, it covers the amount of debt Obama added… in February!
And he pretends that he’s the serious adult at the table.
I used to think that Obama had a clue, but with every passing day I’m convinced that he’s just winging it up there. The White House applied their Keynesian 101 philosophy towards the economy and it didn’t work. President Obama doesn’t have back up plan. He’s going to lie, deceive, obfuscate, a make it to the next election.
Right on cue, Charles Krauthammer has written an article on the Value Added Tax (VAT). Selling people an entitlement is much easier than a massive tax increase. As I’ve stated before, Europe had a lot more flexibility with their budges because the United States was providing defense during the Cold War. Things just aren’t as simple in the United States.
Obama set out to be a consequential president, one on the order of Ronald Reagan. With the VAT, Obama’s triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan’s strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes; then, ultimately, you have to reduce government spending.
Obama’s strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast, and then feed it. Spend first — which then forces taxation. Now, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state and the beast will have to be fed. The VAT is the only money tree in creation that’s large enough.
Americans are desperately in need of honest and adult leadership. President Obama is just trying to increase the welfare state. He’s framed the entire health care debate dishonestly. ObamaCare isn’t deficit neutral and the way that the White House and the Democrats in Congress cooked the books for the CBO is just disgraceful.
I’m just not sure Americans are ready to hear the truth. We can’t afford these programs. It would be nice if we could make things better by nationalizing health care, automobile manufacturers, and student loans. The truth is we can’t have it all, but no one has the guts to tell the American people.
It’s time to put ObamaCare behind me and safely on the dusty back shelf I call my cerebral cortex. There are plenty of battles ahead, but other issues loom on the horizon, like the ever-controversial kickball postseason. The Democrats are busy giving themselves high fives and Tom Harkin is promising to add the public option in next year’s budget. Even under the rosiest scenario there are going to be less Democrats in Washington this time next year.
The problem Democrats have is that they just passed a massively unpopular bill and they don’t have anything they can offer the American people that’s popular. I guess they could try to pass the climate change bill (a.k.a., cap and trade), but that’s probably hung up forever in the Senate. They could tackle the immigration issue. However, the Democrats are in favor of amnesty, which is another unpopular topic. What about the Value Added Tax (VAT)? Mmmmmmmmm. That sounds good!
One pundit who has been absolutely outstanding in his predictive powers over the past year is Charles Krauthammer. He predicted early on that ObamaCare would pass and he never wavered, even in January after Brown’s election. Krauthammer believes that a national sales tax in inevitable.
I’m not exactly sure how the President is going to make this case to the American people. Passing a Utopian entitlement is easy. Passing a massive tax increase during a severe recession won’t be very popular. What happens if the Supreme Court strikes down ObamaCare? There’s a chance the individual mandate will be declared unconstitutional. Unless there’s a massive economic boom in the next six months things are likely to get worse for Obama and the Democrats.
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