2012 on the Brain
The Tea Party won the largest midterm election victory since 1938 on the theme that Obama’s rate of borrowing and debt-creation were unsustainable and made worse, not better, by massive new Obama health care and green initiatives. So Obama, now well below 50% in the polls, is to be reinvented as a reasoned budget cutter. Note the logic that suddenly after ObamaCare and green fiascos we pause in midstream, and talk of fiscal restraint and again more taxes. The thinking is analogous to this: the adolescent takes the chronically indebted family Master Charge card, maxes it out, has no more credit, and then asks his father and mother to take on additional jobs to find the money to pay off the debt, but while insisting that he keep all his previously charged junk — and the card as well. At some point in July 2011, all the money borrowed since 2009 was deemed absolutely essential. Nothing was wasted. There was no fraud. Instead, all that $5 trillion saved lives and the planet as well. Borrowing a trillion dollars for ObamaCare cannot be renegotiated.
Obama 2.0 is talking, then, of some cuts to projected added expenditures, not going back and cutting a $1 trillion ObamaCare initiative or the tens of billions in green subsidies, much less just balancing the budget by adopting the 2007 budget levels. Any argument that government expenditures have reached a record percentage of GDP, or that combined state, federal, and payroll taxes can gobble over 50% of one’s income, or new figures that the U.S. is the most progressively taxed of the Western democracies, or that almost 50% of the population pays no income taxes, or that 5% now pay almost 60% of the aggregate income tax obligation — all that is rendered meaningless.
