This coming weekend, Congress and the president are planning to meet to attempt to cobble out a compromise on raising America's debt ceiling up from $14.3 trillion to avoid a government 'default' by August 2nd.
The Republicans so far have refused to consider this unless they see substantial cuts in spending, to which the President and most of his fellow Democrats have replied with their mantra of cuts in exchange for tax increases on 'the Rich'.
Yes...with our economy in decline and 9.2 unemployment that the government is willing to admit to , their answer is to raise taxes on the private sector,crippling the very engine that could pull us out of the economic morass we're in.
As part of the battle, the administration and the president have been beating the class warfare drum about fat cats, 'corporate jet owners' and of course, those Evil Oil and Gas Companies.
A media with any pride in itself or regard for the traditional ethics of the Fourth Estate would laugh at these claims out of hand; the real 'fat cats' are the public employee unions, the UAW, and Obama's staff, the corporate jet tax break was something the Obama Administration dreamed up as part of the 'stimulus' and government's share of the retail profits on a gallon of gas for doing absolutely nothing but being there is 18%-25% (depending on where you live) as opposed to 9% for those greedy oil companies for discovering, drilling, shipping, refining, distributing, and marketing it.
Lots of the same old rhetoric from the president and his allies about the GOP lashing Medicare and Social Security is also in the air. The president, with his usual contempt, is counting on seniors being to stupid to remember that it was he and his party that shoved through an ObamaCare bill that swiped half a trillion dollars from Medicare to pay for it, or to research Congressman Ryan's budget and realize that far from gutting Social Security, he's calling for reforms of an already bankrupt system that might actually save it, and won't effect present retirees.
I mention these things in passing to get to my main point. President Obama and much of his party are simply not to be trusted when it comes to any deal they might make on spending cuts.
President Reagan found that out the hard way in 1982, when he agreed to a deal strikingly similar to the one being offered by President Obama and the Democrats now, three dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in tax increases he agreed to. In the end, the tax increases came but the spending cuts did not, and President Reagan remarked more than once that going along with it was one of his biggest regrets as president.
The entire Democrat ethos is based on a simple formula, one that's existed since the days of Tammany Hall - bribe select groups at the expense of the taxpayers in exchange for votes and kickbacks.
The GOP in the House now holds the key to severely disrupting that formula, which accounts for a lot of the frenzied rhetoric. They're the ones holding the cards, and if they hold the line on huge spending cuts - real ones this time Mr. Boehner - and reject tax increases, Obama and theDemocrats are going to have to go along with it in order to raise the debt ceiling, or risk being seen as the cause of the default.
If they fold, the political fallout will be catastrophic. 235 Republican House members signed a 2010 pledge not to raise taxes, and if they go back on their word, it will come back to haunt them in 2012. And it will hand President Obama a victory he doesn't deserve,because he'll be seen as a 'moderate' by his base who stood up to the Republicans and won.
Let's not forget that it was the president and his party who couldn't be bothered to pass a budget when they held both houses of Congress, who quadrupled the deficit largely to fund their political allies, who wasted money on a bogus 'stimulus' that stimulated nothing, who weakened our currency with 'quantitative easing'.
Now, they're threatening that if the Republicans won't them the new taxes they demand, President Obama will veto the debt ceiling and the Democrats and their media allies will blame them for the default.
There is absolutely no upside in falling for this charade. If that's the deal they're offering, the Republicans ought to call their bluff and stand firm, because they have nothing to lose. If they do, they'll be true to their pledged word rewarded by the electorate as well as starting to curb the monster of federal spending and debt that threatens to swallow us all.
The alternative is to trust someone manifestly untrustworthy to keep his word, be punished at the polls by the people who trusted them and to see the United States wind up in the same straits as Greece, Portugal and Ireland.
No. Not this time. Stand firm and win.
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