It’s a two-fer that only President Barack Obama could propose with a straight face.

The Obama administration is proposing to extend a financial sweetener the federal government offers states that expand their Medicaid programs, in a bid to persuade more to do so before the president leaves office.
White House officials said President Barack Obama will ask Congress to include three years of full federal funding of expansion for any state that extends eligibility for the program to most low-income residents. Officials said the proposal will be made in Mr Obama’s fiscal 2017 budget, to be released Feb 9.

More Federal spending. Billions of dollars of spending to persuade States to expand their Medicaid programs, an addictive “offer”—addiction to Federal dollars.

And that’s the foolishness. Obama is promising to do this for three more years. Three years in which to get the suckered States hooked on the Federal government’s street corner product.

This move of his hasn’t anything at all to do with low-income citizens. It has everything to do with vote pandering.

In an election year.

The reason we need to raise the national debt limit is to be able to borrow to pay existing obligations. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s threats that he can’t won’t pay our veterans, soldiers, and retireds is nothing but politically motivated, dishonest foolishness. He can pay these; the tax revenues are plenty for that. What he won’t be able to pay are the payables to Federal contractors and a number of other bills. Those are legitimately owed, though, and they need to be paid.

There’s also plenty of money coming in to pay the interest on our national debt—so there’ll be no default, either. That’s just nonsense.

What’s unacceptable, though, is the Democrats’ refusal to go along with a debt-raise bill that includes spending cuts that will obviate the need to raise the debt ceiling next year and in the out years. President Barack Obama has even said he’ll veto a debt-raise bill that includes such preventive measures. He’s said it’s nonnegotiable.

That’s unconscionable. The Democrats’ addiction to spending—and it is an addiction—has got to be broken. If the only way to cut spending so we don’t need to increase our borrowings next year is to close the Federal government, so be it.

But the Republicans, including the right side, and their “communications” directors had better be able to sell the shutdown to the nation’s public. Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D, MD) said it:

[T]hey ought to all be fired[.]

Unfortunately, he wasn’t looking in a mirror when he said it.

Turn the rascals out in a year and a month.