Looking Forward To A Shutdown

by Robert Cleveland | January 15, 2013 12:02 am

President Obama’s press conference yesterday showed America just exactly what he meant when he said he would not negotiate on raising the debt ceiling. He will not negotiate. He will take no prisoners. He will accept nothing less than complete and total surrender to his agenda.

Once again, the President of the United States seeks to blind the American people to reality, giving them instead a convenient collection of sound bites that place all blame this crisis he created at the feet of Republicans in Congress.

President Obama came out with a lot of lies right out of the gate in the final presser of his first term, and chief among them was his claim that he had cut federal spending by $1.4 trillion over the past two years. He has made that claim many times, and tends to get a pass on it from the media, but the truth is that federal spending increased by $147 billion just last year[1]. This is the game that Washington politicians always play when they don’t want the general public to know the truth: they reduce an increase in spending, and call that a “cut,” even though in the end the American taxpayers are still on the hook for more money.

The president went on to talk about what he calls “$600 billion in new revenue” that will result from “making sure the wealthiest Americans begin to pay their fair share.” To start with, you can’t really ignore the glaringly insulting stupidity it takes for the President of the United States to openly state that the wealthiest Americans, who for decades have been responsible for carrying the vast majority of America’s tax burden, have only just now begun to pay their fair share. But beyond that, we have no way of knowing how much actual revenue the Fiscal Cliff deal will generate. The evidence shows[2] that higher tax rates result in lower tax revenues. This is not some voodoo economics that is up for debate — that is the way it has worked, time and time again, and there is nothing President Obama can do to change the economic reality of that fact. His $600 billion in new revenue is a pipe dream; he may as well kiss that money goodbye just like he did all of the millions he wasted in subsidies to failing green energy companies.

But I don’t want to get into a statement-by-statement refutation of President Obama’s economic idiocy. Suffice it to say that the president is selling a false bill of goods to the American people, and scarcely a word that comes out of his mouth on economic issues can be trusted. This cannot be over-emphasized: What President Obama is doing to our nation is nothing short of the engineered destruction of the American economy.

The president has laid out a vision of what will happen to America if Congress fails to cave yet again into his economically ruinous agenda, and it is the exact same tale of doom and destruction he spells out each and every time we find ourselves in one of these manufactured crises. Even as he accused Republicans of holding the nation to ransom, he threatened to withhold Social Security payments and Veterans’ benefits. He called it a “self-inflicted wound on the economy.” What little he knows.

The entire reason we have a debt ceiling is to keep government spending under control and to prevent our nation’s debt from crippling us. As it stands right now, each and every politician in Washington only cares about fiscal responsibility when the other party’s guy is in office. Republicans didn’t seem to care about raising the debt limit when George W. Bush was in office, yet according to then-Senator Obama, raising the debt ceiling was the worst thing an American president could possibly do.

In his own words, from 2006 (via Hot Air[3]):

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies…Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

If America was facing a dangerous debt problem and a lack of leadership back in 2006, when our deficits and debt were so insignificant compared to what we face today, how much worse is it now?

Yet according to our president, America does not have a spending problem.

“We’ve got to pay our bills,” the president condescendingly lectured us yesterday, yet he himself acknowledges that we cannot pay our bills without depending “on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies.”

Here’s a hint, Mr. President: if it was a bad idea then, it’s a worse idea today.

It’s not that President Obama cares about our nation’s debt problems; he doesn’t. It’s not that he’s trying to reduce our deficit; he isn’t. It’s not that he ever cared how we paid for our overspending; he never did, and as long as he can push Congress into giving him what he wants, he never will.

Take all of the problems that President Obama complained about in 2006 and multiply them by ten, and that is what this president is inflicting on our nation.

When it comes to standing up against this ruin and actually doing what is right for America, Republicans don’t have a lot of options. President Obama has made it perfectly clear that he isn’t even willing to acknowledge that our government spends more than it should, even while he constantly pushes to spend more money. The Democrats couldn’t even craft a relief bill for Hurricane Sandy victims without packing it full of unnecessary spending that has nothing to do with hurricane relief – and then they have the gall to criticize Republicans when it takes extra time to cut out the pork. They will never let a crisis go to waste. They will take any opportunity to grow our government and spend even more money.

If it means denying the Left the opportunity to waste even more of my money, then I’m actually looking forward to seeing the debt ceiling stay in place. We already have far too much debt. It’s time for the government to live within its means, just like millions of Americans have to do every day. The Democrats have been paying lip service to deficit reduction, including cutting multiple deals over the past several decades that are supposed to include spending cuts, yet time after time they renege on the cuts and stick taxpayers with the bill. Meanwhile, the American bureaucracy gets bigger and bigger, while Americans’ freedoms get smaller and smaller.

Despite the president’s portents of doom and gloom, I would rather see another government shut-down, and its consequences, as long as one of those consequences is that something real is done about stopping our deficit and reducing our debt, instead of the constant empty rhetoric and fiscal shell games we have been treated to for far too long.

Endnotes:
  1. increased by $147 billion just last year: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-i-cut-spending-over-trillion-dollars-2011
  2. The evidence shows: http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2012/12/04/cut_tax_rates_boost_tax_revenues_100020.html
  3. Hot Air: http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2011/07/15/flashback-2006-senator-obama-voted-no-on-raising-the-debt-ceiling/

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