Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Raise Taxes

56 Comments

…or Granny gets it:

…he drew plaudits from what used to be called the mainstream media. “Obama Grasping Centrist Banner in Debt Impasse” read the New York Times headline. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza dubbed him “Dad-in-Chief,” explaining: “Boil Obama’s message down and you get this: Adults sometimes have to do things that they don’t want to do. This is one of those times. So, let’s get it done.”

The kids are acting up, so he threatens to starve Granny to death. That’s just how a strong father behaves.

It looks to us as if Obama may once again be overestimating his persuasive powers by relying for feedback on journalists who, for a combination of ideological, partisan and personal reasons, are predisposed to take his side. NewsBusters.org has a useful compilation of what it calls the “softballs” reporters lobbed at yesterday’s press conference. Some of them were actually a bit adversarial, but only from the left.

I hope he continues to live in his leftist media cocoon. It will only reduce his chances of reelection.

His advice to the American people seems to be that if one has a problem with taxes, one should get better tax software and stop asking so many questions, or find the severed head of a horse in your bed.

If I were a Republican candidate, I’d make a statement that, if I were president, I wouldn’t use the elderly as human shields to compel people meet my unreasonable demands.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of press sycophancy, is Obamageddon coming to a city near you?

The election of the first African-American president was widely hailed as a giant step forward for American racial politics. The future, however, may remember this administration as a giant step back for Black America during a period of deepening alienation, anger and despair in America’s inner cities.

Not since the 1960s, when scores of American cities were shaken by one race riot after another, have African-Americans faced such deadly conditions: high expectations and hopes running up against a reality of vanishing jobs, shrinking government budgets and a fractured and fragmented leadership. Barring an unlikely change in economic fortunes we could soon face a new period of explosive anger and even violence; alternatively, the urban poor could fall prey to a new kind of passive despair and anomie as hope dies on one inner city street after another.

Either way, the mainstream press’s slowly fading intoxication with the Obama administration has led it to miss the dimensions of the new urban crisis now stalking the United States. The liberal Reagan, they swooned back in the good old days. No — the new FDR! No, wait! The new Lincoln!

But as the rosy glow surrounding the administration and all its works slowly dies away, many Americans will be taken aback at the urban crisis that quietly and unostentatiously took shape while the fatuously exhilarated press choirs sang about the hope and the change that was coming our way.

It is ironic that he may be the worst president for blacks, ever.

[Update a while later]

The president needs to stop scaring seniors. Apparently he disagrees.

56 thoughts on “Raise Taxes”

  2. Without Chris and Jim and a few others, this place would be in danger of becoming an echo chamber. At least they’re reasonably intelligent guys and they make better arguments than you will find from the majority of the Left. Think of it as an opportunity to hone your own positions.

  3. At that point the Treasury has to break a law, either borrowing beyond the debt ceiling or not spending money that Congress ordered it to spend

    Tsk. Well, luckily Congress can fix that quite easily, by passing another law that explains how the Treasury should allocate the money it does, and declaring that supersedes the Continuing Resolutions passed in the spring. Problem solved!

    You can’t be serious. An immediate $1.5T cut in federal spending would throw millions of people out of work.

    Yes, it probably would. A few thousand government drones, at least, would be let go. Then there’s be lots of people in the private sector who contract with the Feds, or who live by writing grant applications and getting lots of that money. The price of corn would collapse as ethanol subsidies abruptly ended. Probably the cost of milk would drop as well. This would put great pressure on farmers, and some of the least productive or who’d gone most for ethanol fads might lost the farm.

    But I see this as a necessary evil. Far too many people work for the government, moving papers around, and far too many others nominally in the private sector suck at the public tit, doing nearly nothing of any genuine use.

    I suspect the plain fact is that the reason US productivity growth has crapped out is just that — that too many otherwise talented and clever people are wasting their labor on the sterile Pyramid-building and massive transport of dirt from this hole to that that is modern goverment. When so much of your national talent is spinning its wheels, jerking off, is it any wonder you don’t get rich?

    The pain has to come. People have to rethink their careers, dedicate themselves to doing things that are useful to other people, and not that merely appeal to 535 lawyers’ idea of what is a Good Idea. Only then will we become productive again, and have a chance at the kind of wealth building we saw from the 50s to the 80s, subtracting the braindead Carter 70s.

    Since the pain has to come, the sooner and sharper the better, just as with house prices. There’s no benefit in taking your cod liver oil a tiny sip at a time, unless you’re a masochist.

    You’re like the 300 pound guy with shortness of breath who’s unwilling to start the diet today, because Good God he’s hungry. Indeed. But starting our diet tomorrow has been the Master Plan for the past 40 years, with evident results. Time for a new start.

  4. I said: Obama and the Democrat Congress increased spending by +1 Trillion dollars in their very first year.

    Jim wrote: ARRA was about a half-trillion.

    To which I respond now, where did I mention ARRA? Or is Jim going to deny that expenditures during the first year didn’t go up a trillion dollars? From the President’s own GPO:

    2007 outlays: 2,728,940,000,000
    2008 outlays: 2,982,881,000,000
    2009 outlays: 3,997,842,000,000
    2010 outlays: 3,591,076,000,000
    2011 outlays: 3,614,774,000,000

    ARRA may be half of it, so tell us again, Jim, why Obama can only cut $2 Billon next year, and not the other 1/2 trillion spending he and Democrat Congress heaped on us?

    Even if you keep up trend in spending increases from the Republican Congress and President, there is at least $300 billion that could be cut next fiscal year. And remember, we got rid of that Congress and President because of their excessive spending.

  6. Taxation without consent is theft. You can pooh pooh that idea, but it doesn’t change the facts. You could say consent is unworkable, but again that doesn’t change the fact. You could say that majority rules, but again that doesn’t mean government has consent. It’s purely force against (I was going to say minority, but that isn’t exactly true.) We’ve been brainwashed so that they can get away with more and more expansion of this travesty and pointing that out makes you some fringe lunatic.

    Withholding services for those unwilling to pay is moral. Forcing people to pay for something they don’t want is immoral.

    We have lived in this immoral system for so long that questioning it is an act of lunacy.

    What’s the solution? I don’t see any. Not on this earth. We have to get back to first principles. We need a frontier.

    Agreements freely made (contracts) should be enforced by the community.
    Harm to others should be punished by the community.
    Property ownership should be inviolate (no eminent domain.)
    Only then would we be a free people.

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