On Wednesday night, House Speaker John Boehner walked out of a White House meeting

House Speaker John Boehner essentially walked out of debt limit negotiations with President Obama Saturday night

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/07/09/bo...#ixzz1S7m5NJDA

ONE PRESIDENT LEFT BEHIND: McCONNELL SCHOOLS OBAMA ON DEBT
July 13, 2011


Democrats don't want to cut any government spending programs, not now, not ever. The country is on a high-speed bullet train to bankruptcy (the only kind of bullets liberals approve of), and the Democrats' motto is: Spend! Spend! Spend!

Democrats are at an advantage in the "should the U.S. go bankrupt or not?" debate because, based on their economic policies so far, they obviously favor bankruptcy.

This allows them to sit back and demand that Republicans propose all the spending cuts and then turn around and scream that Republicans have declared war on the poor and disadvantaged.

It's a nice trick, especially considering Republicans control only the House.

Meanwhile, the Democrats control all other branches of our government: the Senate, the White House, and The New York Times op/ed page. What's their plan?

Their plan is to keep spending, while blaming tax breaks for corporate jets for the entire $14.3 trillion deficit. The Democrats will never suggest any cuts to a budget that has put the country another $4 trillion in debt only since Obama became president.

So Republicans keep proposing cuts and Democrats keep riling up the increasingly large number of people who get checks from the government.

Nothing ever gets cut, but more people hate Republicans for having proposed any cuts at all. If you've never worked for the government, you have no idea of the vicious campaigns of vilification that will be brought by the recipients of government largesse against the smallest reduction in that largesse.

Ask Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose governorship was finished when he put a series of initiatives on the ballot to make the tiniest reductions in government workers' benefits.

Ask Scott Walker and all elected Republicans in Wisconsin who brought on Greek-style riots by suggesting that government employees start paying 6 percent of their own pension contributions and 12 percent of their health care insurance.

Ask Rep. Paul Ryan, whose modest proposal to reduce Social Security payments -- starting 15 years from now -- has turned him into a national pariah.

Ask the next president of the United States, New Jersey's Gov. Chris Christie. (And ask him nicely -- I hear the guy's got a temper!)

The problem isn't with elected Republicans; the problem is that the people want their treats. According to a Gallup poll in January, more than 60 percent of Americans want no cuts to Social Security and Medicare, which currently consume more than one-third of the entire federal budget.

Obama and the rest of his party are determined to keep increasing the size of our massively bloated government, on and on, year after year, without end in sight, until everyone with a job works exclusively to pay taxes to the government. Plan B is for everyone to move to Greece.

Republicans can't cut anything as long as they control only one-half of one branch of government. If purist conservatives on the outside want serious spending cuts, they'd better give the GOP a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress first.

Meanwhile the nation sinks deeper into debt.

Republicans tried using the expiring debt ceiling to force the Democrats to agree to budget cuts. But the Democrats still refused to propose any.

Obama's big idea for taming a government with a $3.83 trillion budget and a $14.3 trillion debt is to collect -- in the best-case scenario -- another $300 million a year from corporate jet owners. That would cover .007 percent of the federal budget or .002 percent of the national debt. Is it happy hour yet?

Instead, Democrats demagogued the issue, with Obama flying around the country on Air Force One, claiming that if the debt ceiling is not raised, America will default on its debts and the entire economy will collapse.

If Republicans cut government spending, recipients of government checks come after them with pitchforks. If the Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling to force spending cuts, the economy collapses.

In general, the trend seems to be in the direction of higher spending and endless debt.

The government will just keep spending and spending until we're all on bread lines. But there won't be any bread because within 10 years, nearly the entire federal budget will go to pay Social Security and Medicare recipients. (On the plus side, a lot of us will be speaking Greek by then.)

But now, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has checkmated the Democrats. He has proposed a bill that will allow Obama to raise the debt ceiling three times, up to $2.4 trillion, over the next 18 months, but only provided Obama proposes equivalent cuts in spending each time.

Finally, the Democrats will be forced to pony up spending cuts -- or default on the debt and crash the economy.

Contrary to some hysterical Republicans, McConnell's bill does not forfeit any of Congress' authority: The House and Senate will still have to decide whether to accept Obama's proposed cuts when they write their appropriations bills.

But we will finally get some proposed cuts to federal programs from Obama, and not more nonsense about theoretical savings from "investing" in our children's future with additional spending on Pell grants and prenatal counseling.

McConnell's deal cleanly takes the debt ceiling issue off the Republicans' back and puts it on the president's back. Either the Democrats tell us what they'll cut or they'll have to admit: "We will never cut anything. Everything Ann Coulter says about us is true!"

“Austerity” is giving “unsustainable” strong competition for becoming the financial buzzword of the year. However, within the Democratic Party and the political left, we seem still to have an abundance of something. Unfortunately, that something is hypocrisy. When we expect serious and mature leadership from our president to state publicly what he knows privately to be true, he ratchets up populist class warfare or chooses solutions aimed at placating the liberal allies on whose financial support his party depends.

Case in point. Mr. Obama, three years after they were negotiated, finally acknowledges the jobs that would be created by Senate approval of the trade agreements with Korea, Panama and Columbia. The president is now describing the agreement with South Korea, which will reduce Korean tariffs on U.S. cars and trucks and open what Ford Motor Co. described as “the most closed automotive market in the world” as one which will produce numerous jobs for Americans. Last year South Korea imported 13,000 American cars while it exported 560,000 vehicles to the U.S. White House spokesman, Jay Carney, stated “it is time to move forward [with the 3 agreements] which will support tens of thousands of jobs.” Unfortunately, the president tied the approval of the treaties to spending close to a billion dollars on additional assistance to workers displaced from jobs, a program that has proven completely useless unless subsidizing unions is a national priority. This at a time when the Administration is supposedly trying to reduce the deficit as a key element in the legislation it knows is vital as a precondition to raising the nation’s debt ceiling.

The president at a pre-July 4 press conference inveighed against millionaires, billionaires and owners of private jets, but intentionally ignored the real facts and distorted reality. Or as one blogger, paraphrasing Charles Krauthammer stated it:

Never mind that in the grand scheme of things, the amount of tax that corporate jet owners are excused from paying is so minuscule that if the government collected it every year for 5,000 years, they would cover one year of the debt that the Obama administration has run up. The point the president was trying to make, as he amps up his relentless class warfare argument, is that all over America children go to bed hungry while greedy fat cats get a tax break on the jets they buy.

This is a stunning reversal of reasoning. The Wall Street Journal noted that the president’s 2009 stimulus plan specifically stated that “the aviation industry, which is cutting jobs as it suffers from declining shipments and cancelled orders, hopes the tax break in the economic stimulus bill . . . will persuade more companies to buy planes and snap a slump in general aviation.”

And while we don’t begrudge any spending to provide the highest level of security for the president’s family, we wonder who footed the bill for the aviation which took Mrs. Obama, Malea and Sasha on an African safari late in June. Even considering security needs, why doesn’t the Obama family take a less expensive trip on the taxpayers tab and go to the beach on the eastern shore of Maryland like many other Washingtonians. But we digress.

Michael Barone, writing in The Washington Examiner on July 1 pointed out another interesting twist to the corporate jet issue:
Mr. Obama and the Democratic Senate are insisting on a tax increase for the “richest” Americans who, they claim, control a vast percentage of America’s private wealth. Income and wealth they argue is becoming more and more unequal. But is it the government’s role to redistribute wealth so that no one can make what the leftist politicians deem “too much money.” Let’s set aside the ill conceived government policies and absent oversight that resulted in the excesses and abuses in the mortgage banking business that so traumatized our credit markets, Have the myriad investments of wealthier Americans in the free enterprise system taken anything away from those less fortunate? Does the left really believe that there is no wealth creation in a market driven economy and that they must reshuffle wealth so it is more equally distributed?

In their book, “Onslaught from the Left,” economists Arthur Laffer and Ford Scudder present facts that simply prove that wealth in the upper income brackets creates wealth throughout the income system. They wrote:

“In the year Ronald Reagan took office (1981) the top 1% of income earners as reflected by the Adjusted Gross Income of all tax filers paid 17.58% of all federal income taxes. Twenty-five years later, in 2005 the top 1% paid 39.8% of all income taxes, representing a greater than doubling of the share of tax payments made by this group.

“But even more to the point, from 1981 to 2005 the income taxes paid by the top 1% rose from 1.59% of GDP to 2.96% of GDP. In addition to the huge rise in the percent of GDP paid in income taxes by the top 1% of income earners and the more than doubling of the share of taxes paid by this group was the huge absolute increase in real taxes 2005 dollars using the GDP price deflator (in other words, adjusting for inflation from 1981 through 2005). In 1981 total tax payments from the richest 1% were $98.84 billion, while in 2005 the top 1% paid $368.13 billion in taxes; that’s a 288% increase in 25 years. In rough numbers, that means that each of the richest 1% of filers in 1981 paid a little over $100,000 in 2005 dollars, while in 2005 each filer on average paid over $288,000. And remember that’s inflation-adjusted dollars.”

Although the rich got richer they paid nearly four times as much total tax as when tax rates were higher. In fact, statistics show that lower tax rates have led to higher income among the bottom fifty percent of income earners and lower total taxes paid by that group. In point of fact, fifty percent of federal tax filers pay no tax at all. In short, Mr. Obama so wants to engage in class warfare rhetoric that he is prepared to punish the rich even if that results in less rather than more government revenue.

As Mr. Obama well knows, we don’t tax too little, we have a spending problem and it cannot be resolved without structural reforms particularly to the major so-called entitlements: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — problems which are compounded by the demographics of an aging population and which he and his party consider untouchable.

Finally, returning to the word “hypocrisy,” how can one have confidence in our president when at this late date in the fiscal year he has presented no budget to replace the one that was defeated in the Senate 97-0, preferring instead to rail against the spending cuts proposed by Congressional Republicans” How can he point to the fiscal mess we are in (yes, we know that he inherited it) and not mention the bursting of the housing bubble, which was the driving force behind the great recession and whose main actor was Fannie Mae. Democrats for years resisted reform of that agency, which just happened to be their campaign finance piggybank. As Columnist David Brooks noted in reviewing Reckless Endangerment by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner:

Fannie Mae could raise money at low interest rates because the federal government implicitly guaranteed its debt. In 1995, according to the Congressional Budget Office, this implied guarantee netted the agency $7 billion. Instead of using that money to help buyers, [James] Johnson [then Fannie Mae CEO] and other executives kept $2.1 billion for themselves and their shareholders. They used it to further the cause — expanding their clout, their salaries and their bonuses. They did the things that every special-interest group does to advance its interests.

Fannie Mae co-opted relevant activist groups, handing out money to Acorn, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other groups that it might need on its side . . .

[It] lavished campaign contributions on members of Congress. Time and again experts would go before some Congressional committee to warn that Fannie was lowering borrowing standards and posing an enormous risk to taxpayers. Phalanxes of congressmen would be mobilized to bludgeon the experts and kill unfriendly legislation. . . . a foundation that spent tens of millions in advertising. . . . They spent enormous amounts of time and money capturing the regulators who were supposed to police them.

Mr. Brooks notes that only two of the characters in this tale come off as egregiously immoral. Johnson [a key Democratic party fundraiser] personally made $100 million while supposedly helping the poor. Representative Barney Frank, whose partner at the time worked for Fannie, was arrogantly dismissive when anybody raised doubts about the stability of the whole arrangement.

Think about the president’s explanations of our financial mess. He talks about corporate jet owners and conveniently omits the agency which blew up the bubble and who is the main culprit in the loss of trillions of dollars of wealth. And Barney Frank? He is the co-author of the Dodd-Frank bill, which will now regulate our banking system. Does that give you comfort?

We, hopefully, are on the cusp of an agreement between the Republican leadership and the President on raising the limit on the debt ceiling, but, in the process, we have been treated to the “Coming Attractions” of the 2012 White House election strategy. It isn’t a pretty picture.

By Hal Gershowitz and Stephen Porter

“You’ve heard a lot about the Debt Limit. And I guess that’s – I don’t know how many of you are worried about it or concerned about it. The fact is I think it’s a political charade.

“I’m afraid that the Democrats have done that in the past, threatened to shut down the government. I don’t think there’s a chance that it will happen. I think the last time somebody did, they lost enough seats in the House of Representatives to convince them it was a dumbest thing they ever did. [It] doesn’t get us anywhere, it doesn’t help anybody, and to extend the Debt Limit is nothing more – than people have described it – than that the government’s credit card doesn’t run out of resources.

“And we all know we have more debt than we should be carrying and there’s a fight going on: Should we raise your taxes to lower that debt? Should we quit government spending? The question is if we quit government spending, what do we quit spending? Do we quit spending on Social Security and WIC and children’s daycare? Or do we quit spending for corporate jet deductions, and those sorts of things? And those are the political fights.

“They are going to go on. You’ll hear about them ‘til the end of the year. My prediction is that we will extend the Debt Ceiling; and the Republicans will accuse us Democrats of being big taxers and big spenders; and I guess we’ll accuse them of not being concerned about the elderly, and the poor, and children.

“And the country will go on with its debates, and we hope that you will all stay involved and express your opinions loudly and to all of us. …”

Did we forget about the billions in GOP subsidies, the HUGE military contracts. It's more than an entitlement problem - it's systematic.