Obama the neo-deficit-hawk
President Obama is set to propose his own deficit reduction plan some time later in the week. It’s a bit of a mystery exactly what will be in it, but it seems he may actually step tentatively on the third rail of entitlements (cutting with a “scalpel” rather than a “machete”—Plouffe’s words, not mine, and is that racist of Plouffe?), and propose to ratchet up taxes on his favorite cash cows, the rich.
Ah, it seems only yesterday—but it actually was about two months ago—when Obama unveiled his own budget proposal, which curiously enough avoided the issue of how to reduce the deficit. It seems it wasn’t until Paul Ryan advanced the Republican plan for deficit reduction that Obama decided to counter it with his own, although he’d had plenty of time to do so earlier.
Some Democrats are puzzled and nervous as to what’s up, as well they might be. And this sort of spin from the White House doesn’t illuminate much of anything:
Obama advisers reject any suggestion that the president has changed course or philosophy since the midterm shellacking. “It would be revisionist history to view this as a change in philosophy,” Pfeiffer said. “It’s really a change in the state of the economy. That means the actions we took in the first two years, and particularly at the beginning of the administration, are not necessary right now.”
It’s hard to imagine that could possibly be enough to counter accusations such as the following, nicely put by Rep. Eric Cantor:
…'[W]e had to bring this president kicking and screaming to the table to cut spending” in last week’s 2011 budget negotiations. “It’s really hard to believe what this White House and the president is saying.”
My take? Obama wants to seize some of the ground Ryan occupies now, because he sees the Ryan proposal as both a threat and an opportunity to push his own tax hikes and to do a little dancing around entitlements without really suggesting the hard stuff. He could barely care less about deficit reduction, but he knows it’s popular right now and after all he’s in a campaign. His top priority is getting re-elected. If the Democrats don’t like it—well, there’s still some room under that commodious bus for the lot of them.
Obama is not the least bit concerned about consistency, nor about the charge of hypocrisy. One of his earliest traits as a campaigner was turning on a dime if he thought it would be of strategic benefit to him, and he also learned that he could get away with it. Remember when he broke his campaign financing pledge back in 2007? No problem whatsoever for the press and for those voters who’d already fallen in love with him.
If he performs a similar about-face now, and suggests cuts in programs that Democrats favor, I doubt they’ll look the other way. Patience is running thin. His compromise on the temporary budget is seen by many as weakness, caving, lack of leadership. This may be seen the same way—it really depends on the details, which will be revealed soon enough.
Obama thinks that if he puts both tax hikes and budget cuts in play, the tax hikes will fare better than the budget cuts.
Obama’s deficit and tax proposal is all about freedom for the people. Freedom from the incentives and associated motivation to work hard that makes a free economy competitive and grow. Freedom from responsibility, and the tough choices that can better be made by smart politicians on behalf of citizens who are clearly incapable of understanding that the USA can just borrow and spend our way to prosperity. Spin and deception are the consistent currency of his Administration, and most of the public is through buying it. The smoke and mirrors presentations will continue because Obama is not about to change.
As you noted it is Obama’s M.O. to deal in opposites. Watch him make a few speeches denouncing the prodigal, heedless, spendthrift ways of some unnamed other and he fighting an uphill battle for wise monetary policies as the all wise savior that he is. He did this at the SOTU speech.
He is like the traditional Arab leader who convinces himself that he is clever when he is merely treacherous.
The Red infestation of the media is the key. It’s why leftists target Fox News, conservative radio, and want “net neutrality;” if these are silenced, the leftists would control all of the media.
A properly functioning press would call “Barry” on his rubbish; a Red-infested one is happy to airbrush Trotsky out of the photos where he reviewed the May Day parade.
Well, this is tough to predict (*sarcasm*), but here goes:
1) Obama says he will do everything, no matter how contradictory;
2) Obama will increase taxes, spending, and centralization;
… in a form somewhat like this:
“I will massacre the deficit, dissect entitlements, lower taxes for all human beings (i.e., the non-rich), even as I make sure spending explodes, entitlements balloon and pop like Violet Beauregarde, unemployment dissipates like a fart in the wind, God grants me apotheosis, and centipedes go extinct.”
I added my own wish about centipedes at the end, but the rest is writ.
Personally, I’m uncharacteristically optimistic about this move. All Obama and the Democratic leadership know how to do is spend and raise taxes, so if they want to whittle down the budget fight into “the Bush Tax Cuts debate, Part Deux,” then that is just manna from heaven for our side. It is a guaranteed loser for them.
Any Democratic strategist worth a salt should have known better (Rule for Democrats: Talk Taxes, You Lose), so this tells me that something really shook them up – probably a combo of the realization that Ryan is a figure to be feared, and the horrendous defeat in the Wisconsin supreme court election.
Someone, it seems, seriously miscalculated on the blue side. Demagogy is a potential winner in this debate. Having to defend one’s own tough sell that involves policies which have already been defeated in the court of public opinion (tax hikes especially, and they will be there, in some form) puts one at least half on the defensive, and removes the focus needed for a full blitzkrieg.
I’m shocked, but for once the Republicans don’t look like the Stupid Party.
We’ll see. The progressives are dug-in on rate hikes on payroll taxes and on the “rich,” plus going the full everlasting gobstopper on social security – I’m not sure they would enthusiastically go to bat for anything without even a little of that flavor.
My guess is that Obama will try to pull a trick that proposes huge increases in benefits in exchange for “modest tax reforms,” while sedulously avoiding specifics. He’ll pick two numbers, say, “a tiny 2% contribution” for “trillions in spending cuts,” claim it equals “a balanced budget” while “leaving grandma alive,” and that’s it.
Bring it on. Or am I missing something?
Obama must be desperately concerned about the budget. There will be a fresh batch of 10 second sounbites from him to prove it. And the 44% hangers on will grow back up to 47%. God help us.
And somewhere in Washington Hillary opens up an office window and raises her index finger to see which way the political winds are blowing. I think we’ll see a resignation sometime this summer and a full blown campaign by fall.
I’m pretty sure he is the most unprincipled politician of my life. After campaigning for about 4 solid years about the evils of the Bush “tax cuts for the rich”, he signed a law extending them when they expired. Now, about 4 months later, he’s going to propose raising those taxe rates again? Hysterical.
Then, after pushing government spending to the highest percentage of GDP ever in two years and blowing the budget by trillions, he submits a budget which did nothing to address the gigantic deficit he created. Now two months later he’s worried about the deficit?
He said he’d close Gitmo within a year of his inauguration. It’s still open. He wanted to try KSM in NYC, now he’s going to be convicted at Gitmo. He wanted to bring troops home from Afghanistan, instead he doubles our presence there.
The only thing he is consistent about is his inconsistency. I just don’t understand how anybody can be pleased with this flip-flopper.
Is it too late for Hillary to throw her pantsuit in the ring for 2012?
I’m pretty sure he is the most unprincipled politician of my life.
No, that would be George Soros. Obama is merely his press secretary.
Scott,
Obama is not consistent about his inconsistency, he consistently does the opposite of what he says he’ll do. He’s actually very CONsistent about that.
IMO we must come to the conclusion that Obama operates through ideological blinders. Kolnai mentions above that all his administration can do is spend and raise taxes. Indeed, that’s all they know. In fact this willful blindness seems to be a progressive trait (see this article by Richard Eskow at Huffpo, where he wails about the [conservative] minority imposing their will on a [progressive] majority of the people.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/why-progressives-keep-on_b_847054.html
I see an administration that’s totally beside itself trying to figure out why it”s solutions don’t work. The real solutions to our problems exist outside of the Obamans field of vision. It’s like believing that the sun moves around the earth. Your senses tell you that on a daily basis; just watch the sun and you’ll see, it moves across the sky. For the past 70 years we’ve “solved” all of our problems by spending more money. So how do we solve the problem of too much spending? Why, spend more money, natch!
Off topic comment:
Congratulations on the generally civil tone of your website. It’s a pleasure to read.
When T says,” I see an administration that’s totally beside itself trying to figure out why it’’s solutions don’t work,” he is, regrettably, quite wrong. That sort of motive does not exist in Baraq’s administration. Second-guess themselves? Nope, hasn’t happened and ain’t gonna.
I figure Baraq is fixed in community organizer mode: keep ’em lathered up, keep ’em moving-direction don’t matter- as long as you’re getting paid in money and in favors.
Obama=Chavez
Never thought I’d like The Donald for anything, but he’s working the birther theme hard. We shall see; if he turns up anything he may take on the dimensions of a savior.
“”The real solutions to our problems exist outside of the Obamans field of vision.””
T
I’d say his solutions work just fine given the problem as he and all democrats define it. Which is basically that wealth created is not distributed equally and the solution is to set out redistributing it.
Sort of like solving the problem of some fishermen catching more fish than others by splitting all catches up equally, until the incentive to fish is so destroyed that NOBODY eats as well as before the problem was solved.
SteveH,
“I’d say his solutions work just fine given the problem as he and all democrats define it.”
And there you touch on another aspect of the problem, that the Obamans mis-define the problem itself.
Back to my analogy the the sun moving across the sky, it’s like saying “we want to fire a probe into the sun, and so the probe doesn’t melt from the sun’s heat, we’ll launch it at night.” In Obama’s case, I submit that the solution does NOT work, because it doesn’t re-distribute wealth, it reduces total wealth and re-distributes lack of access to wealth. Everybody (except the elite, of course) becomes equally denied.
He couldn’t do this earlier, he had golf games set up well in advance and there was his NCAA tournament brackets the nation needed to know about.
“…although he’d had plenty of time to do so earlier.”
Time isn’t really the issue here, is it? The Democrats had plenty of time — and all the votes they needed — to pass a freakin’ budget, as required of them by law… and they didn’t do it, because they didn’t want it to become an election issue.
If that’s not putting partisan principle ahead of the needs of the country, I don’t know what is.
Neo, I was actually encouraged a tiny bit by your later link, “Obama the Negotiator”. It was good to see that President Obama actually has principles on which he won’t compromise, other than himself.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
“”the Obamans mis-define the problem itself.””
T
Exactly. Theirs is a problem when solved that creates an even bigger problem of increased misery throughout society. But they don’t care. They just want those more successful in comparison to themselves to not exist and have no problem with increased misery for themselves and everyone else to achieve it.
This is what earned communism being labeled as evil. It comes out of sick and punitive minds that destroy spontaneous lives.
Neo-neocon…
I must up-date you.
Inflation forces the whether vain to spin on a dollar.
—–
The MSM work-up does a great Newspeak on the events.
The Wan ends up backing down…
But you’d think he’d won because of his ‘toughness.’
Pure Gonnabee schtick.
Barack Obama–A few days late and many, many dollars short.
Nah.
You guys don’t have to worry. You can sit there and yell and call Obama all the names you want to your hearts content and guess what?
I don’t blame you.
But he’s going to do as you want.
A. I predict he will not push for nor attempt to raise taxes. And in the unlikely event he does it will be on the middle class and poor. His administration is consistent in that.
B. The only real issue is what to cut and how much to cut. The Republicans have set the agenda for over a year now. Obama will not increase any benefits, indeed he’ll try to , as an example, raise the retirement age for social security.
Obama is Republican lite in terms of economics. He’s been consistent in that for two years, and he’s not going to stop now.
And here’s the funny thing: as anyone who reads Market Ticker knows none of the stuff currently proposed by Democrats or Republicans is enough to eradicate the budget deficit, save defense or entitlement spending, or any of that.
Let the farce play on, until it can’t play anymore.
Obama’s newest version of a budget will be thousands of pages of fragrant, dense smoke and the MSM will provide the mirrors. Then the AF1 roadshow begins and the tele-prompter gets to earn its pay.
“none of the stuff currently proposed by Democrats or Republicans is enough to eradicate the budget deficit, save defense or entitlement spending, or any of that.”
Agreed. Though so far no democrat has proposed a budget since the FY 2010 budget, except Obama’s first proposed 2011 budget which remains $1.6 trillion in the hole minus that impressive $38 billion cut that avoided a ‘shutdown’ and saved the Cherry Blossom Festival, the Union of Cowboy Poets, and all those Planned Parenthood mammograms.
“Let the farce play on, until it can’t play anymore.”
If/when “it can’t play anymore” it will not be farcical, things will get nasty fast. 🙁
T says “.. we want to fire a probe into the sun, and so the probe doesn’t melt from the sun’s heat, we’ll launch it at night.”
I thought we already tried that one and it worked just fine? 🙂
Plouffe was talking a lot with his hands yesterday, freudianly making a stop sign with both hands. They are afraid and will start to make nice.
Meanwhile our RINO leaders congratulate themselves on victory.
While the deficit piles up!
This was no adult decision and a loss for the real tea party people as Michelle Bachman knows. Can it be viewed as a strategic decision? No. The power of the stupid is still great enough to want easy and simple solutions. It is looking like only a national economic catastrophe will educate the stupid, the weak, and the lazy.
Parasites are incapable of making a judicial choice. if they could, they would be something else. every tick thinks the body can spare it, until it cant…
SteveH,
You write (4:12 above) that:
“They just want those more successful in comparison to themselves to not exist. . . .”
I actually think it’s deeper than that. The leftists don’t try to disembowel the leftist wealthy like Soros or Michael Moore, both of whose wealth comes from capitalism and free markets, but go all out to destroy the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife
The left is anti-capitalist and ignore the capitalist tendencies of Soros and company because it doesn’t fit the narrative, but focus on the mean capitalist conservative wealthy and private corporations because it does. It’s like trying to justify Leonid Brezhnev’s antique car collection; you CAN’T justify it in a communist system, so you just pretend it doesn’t exist because it belies the narrative.
Brad:
We have to eliminate entitlement spending. We can’t afford it any more. The welfare state needs to go away.
Obama will certainly seek to increase taxes on the middle class, but not the poor. That has been the whole point of shooting spending to the moon. Obama is a Marxist, and this is a war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. He aims to utterly destroy the middle class, and force us all to become dependent on the government.
I read the following from hotair.com:
America’s fiscal soundness can’t be repaired without a significant political shift away from the principles of progressivism and collectivism that have become entrenched at each level of government. We are attempting to turn the ship of state in a positive direction without descending into chaos or succumbing to weakness and corruption: an effort there are few if any historical models for. But there is no fate dictating that we can’t be the nation that achieves this. We have not even begun to tap the idled resources that can be brought to bear, to restore our character, our economy, and our fiscal integrity.
Hotair believes the 2011 budget was a strategic victory. I hope that is the case.
For those of us with wisdom, who look to our own efforts for security, the ride on the edge isn’t thrilling.
Ironically, we have less to lose. What was it that the Vandal said to the Romans when they asked, “Well what does that leave us,” and he told them, “Your lives!” We shall not even say that to our parasites.
I prefer a life without parasites especially for our children. Bring on the hard times. I’ve survived and know how to survive. The consolation will be the renewal of laughter.
rickl:
That’s ridiculous.
Almost all “stimulus ” money has went to bankers and other large money organizations. We had to bail out Wall Street, for chrissake, and you want to defend that, and complain about Obama being socialist?
By your own standards every President for the last 30 years has been a socialist, down to, and including, Ronald Reagan.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter what you or I think, this will be played out to the end and I can guarantee it ain’t going to be making anyone happy. I am reasonably sure the present political order will make it till 2012, after that, all bets are off.
brad,
It is not a question of knowing Obama’s “true” position on anything. It is a question of whether Obama’s weasel-like positioning on any issue is what we need. No one, not investors, small business owners, foreign governments, or private citizens, can count on anything he says. Dems in general may well believe that the earth revolves around the sun. Obama believes the universe revolves around him, and woe to those who deviate from their assigned orbit.
People are getting sick of him spouting off on things he knows nothing about and then reversing himself when hit over the head by reality, especially when his original spouting made a everyday problem into a crisis. Obama legitimizes his deeds by using the word pragmatic. In fact, Jamesian pragmatism says that people define truth as what they have observed from experience to function. Given that Obama has little experience with the real world, it is not surprising that he changes positions regularly. However, I prefer the words incompetent, superficial and narcissistic rather than pragmatic to describe him.
brad:
The stimulus money all went to Democrat constituencies. It was basically a slush fund. Lots of it went to government unions in one way or another. Some of it did indeed go to Wall Street, which heavily supported Obama in 2008. I remember reading somewhere that the Wall Street banks contributed to Obama over McCain by a 5-1 margin.
The middle class was created by capitalism. The dirty little secret about socialism is that it would return society to a two-class medieval system, where a tiny hereditary ruling elite lords it over the masses. The Soviet Union exemplified that. Ordinary people had to stand in line for food, while the nomenklatura could shop at special stores that carried imported goods. Look at Al Gore, who lectures us about being “green” while living like royalty. Many people are suffering greatly in this depression, while the Obamas jet all over the world, utterly carefree. They live like Third World dictators.
Another thing:
We know that Gramscian Marxists have infiltrated and subverted many of our institutions, such as academia, the media, and the Democrat Party (and the Republican Party too, to a lesser extent). Why wouldn’t they have also infiltrated corporations and banks?
What do we really know about Ben Bernanke’s ideology? I haven’t heard it discussed anywhere. Could he be a stealth Marxist working to collapse the system from the inside?
rickl: apropos what you asked –
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/wal-mart-goes-back-to-basics-a-cautionary-tale-for-the-left/
Not sure anything is capable of serving as a cautionary tale for the left, but for the rest of us…
Heh, kolnai, good link and comments.
I remember reading somewhere that the Wall Street banks contributed to Obama over McCain by a 5-1 margin.
That’s a bit high. Goldman Sachs, for example (a favorite target of rants by cognitively challenged liberals, if you’ll pardon the neoplastic construction), went 3:1 for Obama.
Similarly, GE was also a major recipient of TARP funds (owing to losses of GE Capital), and is of course heavily mobbed up with Obama and the Dems (from cap and trade, through CFL bulbs, to Immelt chairing Obama’s Board of Economic Advisors and accompanying Him in Spring Break: Rio Edition.
But the broader point remains. Liberals whining about Wall Street fat cats getting taxpayer bailouts (I agree with them on this, btw) need to be apprised of OpenSecrets.org to see the political leanings of bailout recipients. It’s painfully apparent what happened; one washing the other.
That in and of itself is annoying enough, but then to see the blame shifted to those who did not benefit is too much.
uprickl says, “Some of it did indeed go to Wall Street, which heavily supported Obama in 2008. I remember reading somewhere that the Wall Street banks contributed to Obama over McCain by a 5-1 margin.”
Yes, the myth that Wall Street & the multi-national corporations are the republican puppet masters and conversely the democrats are the champions of the ‘little guy’. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“The middle class was created by capitalism. The dirty little secret about socialism is that it would return society to a two-class medieval system, where a tiny hereditary ruling elite lords it over the masses.”
When you’re right, you’re right.
“What do we really know about Ben Bernanke’s ideology?”
I know exactly what Bernanke’s ideology is: do what it takes to benefit Goldman-Sachs, etc. and kick the can down the road; long term consequences be damned.
A question of neo-landians: What would have happened if they had simply let the over extended banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, Freddie & Fannie, GM, etc. go bankrupt?
sorry about the weird typo… rickl is not uprickl.
“”Obama is Republican lite in terms of economics. He’s been consistent in that for two years, and he’s not going to stop now””
Brad
This is why the lessons of the equality obssessed and wealth redistributionist never get learned. Already jockeying for explanations for when it becomes unavoidable knowledge that Obama was a nightmare president…..Because he was just like a republican!