The Progressives in our Federal government insist, with a straight face, that the Republicans have put forward no concrete proposals in the present budget…negotiations. They carefully ignore the fact that the Republicans already have put forward three concrete proposals: two House-passed budgets (for 2011 and 2012, which contained explicit spending, taxing, and entitlement reform steps), and the proposal on which they campaigned last fall.
Oh, wait—the Progressives studiously ignored those, too—in the Senate, where they refused even to permit debate on the budgets and ever since, with their pretense that the spending, tax, and entitlement reforms of the campaign don’t exist.
The Progressives’ current position? As The Wall Street Journal reports,
[M]any Democrats have ruled out any changes to Social Security during the current fiscal talks.
And
A senior administration official said the White House would make no new offers until Republicans changed their opposition to raising top tax rates.
Throughout this entire shabby charade, President Barack Obama has been accusing the Republicans of holding middle-class America hostage against their refusal to agree to tax rate hikes on his hated Americans. Yet the Republicans and Progressives already agree on making permanent current tax rates on 98% of Americans. It’s Obama who is threatening to blow up our economy on his ego trip of demanding 100% of a tax deal for which he already has 98%.
It’s Obama who’s threatening to blow up our economy by refusing to discuss spending cuts and entitlement reform at all—after agreeing that they should be on the table shortly after the election.
It’s Obama who’s threatening to blow up our economy with his insult of demanding sole debt ceiling authority in utter disregard of the Constitutional role of Congress—and not the President—in setting spending.
Update: Speaker John Boehner (R, OH) and a number fellow members of the Republican leadership made a counterproposal Tuesday that included much of Obama’s precious tax revenue increases–not as rate increases–to the tune of $800 billion, and $1.2 trillion in spending cuts. Obama blew this off within the hour. So much for negotiating.
Ex-Senator Rick Santorum, last night on Greta van Susteren’s On the Record, said that Obama’s fallback–his Plan A–of Sequestration and tax rate increases across the board makes him entirely willing to take our economy over the cliff: Obama gets his tax rate increases, and he gets the Progressives’ decades-long fought-for cut in defense spending, a $500 billion reduction. Obama sees this as a heads, I win; tails, you lose situation.
I think Santorum is right.