Legacy? Does anyone really think that...

[4est_4est_Gump]

a recession is going to deter President Obama from "raising taxes on the rich" and refusing to cut a single benefit program?

It is just plain nuts to treat him like a rational man.

Why are the Republicans playing along? Because it is assumed that Obama has the upper hand. Unless Republicans acquiesce and get the best deal they can right now, tax rates will rise across the board on January 1, and the GOP will be left without any bargaining chips.

But what about Obama? If we all cliff-dive, he gets to preside over yet another recession. It will wreck his second term. Sure, Republicans will get blamed. But Obama is never running again. He cares about his legacy. You think he wants a second term with a double-dip recession, 9 percent unemployment, and a totally gridlocked Congress? Republicans have to stop playing as if they have no cards.

Obama is claiming an electoral mandate to raise taxes on the top 2 percent. Perhaps, but remember those incessant campaign ads promising a return to the economic nirvana of the Clinton years? Well, George W. Bush cut rates across the board, not just for the top 2 percent. Going back to the Clinton rates means middle-class tax hikes that yield four times the revenue that you get from just the rich.

So give Obama the full Clinton. Let him live with that. And with what also lies on the other side of the cliff: 28 million Americans newly subject to the ruinous alternative minimum tax.

Republicans must stop acting like supplicants. If Obama so loves those Clinton rates, Republicans should say: Then go over the cliff and have them all.

And add: But if you want a Grand Bargain, then deal. If we give way on taxes, we want, in return, serious discretionary cuts, clearly spelled-out entitlement cuts, and real tax reform.

Otherwise, strap on your parachute, Mr. President. We’ll ride down together.

Charles Krauthammer

No wonder Obama eats Republican lunch; kobi and all...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

So the Republicans are, in fact, in favor of raising taxes by the rules of the real world. In exchange for doing this, they want the Democrats to deal with the real problem: spending. You could confiscate 100 percent of income over $1 million, and it would cover about a third of the deficit (and crush the economy in the process). You’d still have to deal with spending, particularly entitlement spending.

But the Democrats want to do . . . nothing. Or at least that’s the position they seemed to be taking this week.

The White House and the Democrats have been floating the idea that we can worry about entitlements later, if ever. The urgent thing is to raise taxes on the wealthy as soon as possible. When asked what he was prepared to cut, Senate majority leader Harry Reid said Wednesday, “Now remember, we’ve already done more than a billion dollars worth of cuts. We’ve already done that. So we need to get some credit for that.”

Okay, here’s the credit: That is about .09 percent of the deficit. Take .09 percent of a bow, Harry.

Meanwhile, the GOP seems to be obsessed with Talmudic interpretations of Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge. You see, if the Bush tax cuts expire, we’ll all pay a lot more in taxes. But letting them expire wouldn’t violate the pledge, while voting for a smaller net tax increase would.

As Republicans sort all that out, the guy who actually won the election by claiming he had a better plan hasn’t proposed any plan at all. That’s life inside the Beltway for you.

Jonah Goldberg, NRO

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Look, I'm entitled to my stimulus,

cuz dyin' ain't much of a livin' . . . .

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

He doesn't have a choice...


His peeps want their Obama money and Obama phones.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Recession is coming. We have two bubbles, QE and Education...

The president has “an acute awareness of recent research,” the Post continues, showing that the changing economy has increased the value of a college education and made it harder for those without a degree to succeed. Obama’s solution? “Despite budget pressures, he made a goal of having every student receive at least one year of college.”

Is inequality a problem if prosperity is broadly shared? As John F. Kennedy observed, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Improving the life chances of those at the bottom should be a priority. But the way to do that is to focus on education, family structure, and expanding private-sector employment, not on redistribution of income.

True to Obama’s philosophy, we are pumping cash into the hands of students wishing to attend college. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “Nearly all student loans — 93 percent of them last year — are made directly by the government, which asks little or nothing about borrowers’ ability to repay, or about what sort of education they intend to pursue.”

Sound familiar? It’s exactly the sort of backwards thinking that, to coin a phrase, “got us into this mess.” Politicians (most of them, but not all, Democrats) noticed that homeownership was associated with a number of social goods — steady employment, social engagement, high test scores for children — and decided that the homes were causing the other benefits. Make homeownership more broadly available by making mortgages easier to get, ran the logic, and everyone would benefit.

We know how that turned out. But the Democrats learned all the wrong lessons from that debacle — fairy tales that they may actually believe about greedy Wall Street and rich Republicans. So now we are busy repeating our folly, inflating what Glenn Harlan Reynolds calls the “higher education bubble.”

College is getting more expensive, a lot more expensive. At an annual growth rate of 7.4 percent a year, tuition has vastly outstripped the consumer price index of 3.8 percent. It’s skyrocketed past spiraling health care increases of 5.8 percent. Even the housing bubble at its runaway peak pales in comparison.

Colleges are happy to pocket the windfall while students are being sabotaged. Half of all college graduates cannot find jobs. While homeowners could walk away from underwater mortgages, there is no escape from student-loan debt. Student loans, now in excess of $1 trillion, outstrip car loans and credit-card debt and, unlike those obligations, which are declining, continue to increase because the government is offering what seems to the unwary like a gift.

Just as the housing-bubble collapse wound up increasing, rather than reducing, inequality, the foolish expansion of student-loan debt may hobble an entire generation with a crippling burden. Perhaps the new debtors can console themselves, as they postpone marriage and move in with their parents, that Mr. Obama “cared about the problems of people like me.”

Mona Charen, NRO

 

[Wat_Tyler]

How does Hell like its eggs?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

You say you want that chicken fried...

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Man, I'm no chicken fan.


But Loretta Lynn's old Crisco recipe was pretty edible.


I may have to Google that.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

My Crisco is pretty fresh...


Will I have to buy old Crisco like I buy my Twinkees now?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Facing Up to the Enormity of Our Problem
Daren Jonescu, The American Thinker
November 30, 2012

There will be no short term solution to the problem now facing Western civilization in general, and America in particular. Modern leftist authoritarians and their intellectual progenitors have created a special historical circumstance from which recovery must be painful, slow, and often heartbreaking -- namely, the complete breakdown of the shared birthright of reason and character which has traditionally allowed nations to forge ahead on common ground in the aftermath of even the most violent eruptions.

There is a fond hope in some conservative circles that the inevitable destructiveness of Obama's second term will deliver a broke and broken populace straight into the arms of the kind of common sense conservatism that promises a return to financial stability and civil order, or even into a "second American Revolution." Attractive as this hope may be, its plausibility depends on a number of societal conditions that are unmet in present circumstances.

Allow me to preface my argument against this dream of a leftist implosion by emphasizing that I mean to be neither a doomsayer nor a naysayer. Rather, I certainly believe there is a path to civilizational renewal -- there always is -- but not one likely to fit a neat pattern or short term game plan. Far from any contrarian intentions, throwing the cold light of reason on our dearest wishes helps us to understand the nature and extent of the challenge before us, a necessary first step towards the ultimate victory we will certainly win. Now to the point.

The historical precedent implied in the prediction of socialist self-destruction is not applicable to today's situation. The typical expression of this precedent goes something like this: "Centralized control fails every time it is tried; ergo, it will fail again in America." From this precedent, so the argument goes, it follows that America's collapse under socialism will produce popular grounds for a gradual revival of liberty.

This reasoning is doubtful on two fronts. For one thing, while history shows that socialism does indeed fail, it does not show that this failure always leads to a revival of liberty. The Soviet economy collapsed. The empire dissolved. Successive Russian leaders loosened restrictions on private economic activity. Now Russia has Vladimir Putin, a "democratically elected" KGB dictator for life. If there is a lesson here, it is one very familiar to American conservatives, namely that thugs and demagogues can exploit a failed economy.

China, learning from Russia's mistakes, pulled itself out of communist stagnation by ingeniously intuiting that mere relative liberty can unleash private aspirations powerful enough to sustain economic activity. Thus, a land without property rights, freedom of speech, or political pluralism has manufactured enough ersatz "economic freedom" to invigorate the dormant profit motive in the hearts of the Chinese. The Chinese Communist Party has mass produced "Capitalism: The Parlor Game," and so far that superficial simulacrum of liberty has engendered real world economic results.

It remains to be seen whether the effects of this brilliant psychological manipulation can last. Europe has been functioning on a similar model of carefully regulated business activity permitted within an increasingly oppressive political apparatus for decades now -- with the added Brave New World (Order) cleverness of substituting moral permissiveness for political freedom -- and we are beginning to see the ultimate outcome: an infantilized public employee population screaming for more speed from the back seat as Über-Daddy takes the EU car careering off a cliff and towards a thousand-year descent into the black.

What few cases one can cite of truly revitalized former leftist authoritarian states were buttressed in their recovery by the direct political and economic assistance, as well as the indirect example, of the United States. This is a key point. The failure of socialism is relative. Without a point of stark comparison, failure is less recognizable. Poverty must have a point of reference against which it can be judged as poverty. This, of course, is the main reason modern totalitarian states have always tried to restrict access to the outside world, and to erase their own national history -- they do not want their suffering subjects to see what might have been.

As for the socialist authoritarians themselves, we must not fall into the trap of judging radical leftists as if they think like decent or reasonable people. (The "well-creased-pant-leg-means-he'll-make-a-good-president" fallacy.) What you and I judge as societal failure is, to them, of little consequence in and of itself. For general prosperity is not their goal. In short, the intellectual leaders of the left know as well as you do that their regulatory state with its confiscatory taxation, propagandistic education, and morally subversive cultural elite will not produce prosperity and individual happiness, i.e., that their regime will "fail" the true test of good government. In the authoritarian's eyes, however, the only failure that matters is the loss of his power. With no clear external examples of freer, more prosperous nations, American authoritarians will not face the stress of competing models against which their rule may be judged and found wanting. They will never be put on the spot to justify their oppression with practical results. When the U.S. economy collapses, it will take the world with it. There will be nowhere to go. And there will be no light to look to for hope.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/facing_up_to_the_enormity_of_our_problem.html

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

"With a chip on his shoulder larger than his margin of victory, Barack Obama is approaching his second term by replicating the mistake of his first. Then his overreaching involved health care — expanding the entitlement state at the expense of economic growth. Now he seeks another surge of statism, enlarging the portion of gross domestic product grasped by government and dispensed by politics. The occasion is the misnamed “fiscal cliff,” the proper name for which is: the Democratic Party’s agenda.

"For 40 years the party’s principal sources of energy and money — liberal activists, government-employees unions — have advocated expanding government’s domestic reach by raising taxes and contracting its foreign reach by cutting defense. Obama’s four years as one of the most liberal senators and his four presidential years indicate that he agrees. Like other occasionally numerate but prudently reticent liberals, he surely understands that the entitlement state he favors requires raising taxes on the cohort that has most of the nation’s money — the middle class."
George Will
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...97-363b0f9a0ab3_story.html?wprss=rss_opinions

In America, they first came for the very rich and I didn't speak up because I wasn't rich," said the Rev. Imadem Doinggood. "Then they came for the Bourgeoisie and I didn't speak up because I wasn't Bourgeois. Then they came for the Upper Middle Class blue-collar workers. I didn't speak up because I was a Government clerk. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak up.
A_J, the Stupid

Bourgeois -> The Middle Class

 

[RobDownSouth]

"With a chip on his shoulder larger than his margin of victory, Barack Obama is approaching his second term by replicating the mistake of his first. Then his overreaching involved health care — expanding the entitlement state at the expense of economic growth. Now he seeks another surge of statism, enlarging the portion of gross domestic product grasped by government and dispensed by politics. The occasion is the misnamed “fiscal cliff,” the proper name for which is: the Democratic Party’s agenda.

"For 40 years the party’s principal sources of energy and money — liberal activists, government-employees unions — have advocated expanding government’s domestic reach by raising taxes and contracting its foreign reach by cutting defense. Obama’s four years as one of the most liberal senators and his four presidential years indicate that he agrees. Like other occasionally numerate but prudently reticent liberals, he surely understands that the entitlement state he favors requires raising taxes on the cohort that has most of the nation’s money — the middle class."
George Will
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...97-363b0f9a0ab3_story.html?wprss=rss_opinions

In America, they first came for the very rich and I didn't speak up because I wasn't rich," said the Rev. Imadem Doinggood. "Then they came for the Bourgeoisie and I didn't speak up because I wasn't Bourgeois. Then they came for the Upper Middle Class blue-collar workers. I didn't speak up because I was a Government clerk. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak up.
A_J, the Stupid

Bourgeois -> The Middle Class

So, AJ, are you promoting an expansionist worldview this week? As a glibertarian, do you feel the US should function as the world's policeman? Hmmm?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I say that big talk’s worth doodly-squat!

 

[LiFeNdEaTh]

Look, I'm entitled to my stimulus,

cuz dyin' ain't much of a livin' . . . .

...lol

 

[unregistered]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

He doesn't want to cut a damned thing.

He wants to tarnish the Republicans with a recession and the press already has the story written...

Turbo TIMMAH! wants another 'stimulus.' Yet for the past sixth months we've been told that the economy has turned around and is slowly gaining steam. They know the truth. Neither side is going to offer the cuts required to save us; they plan on picking up the pieces on the other side with the benefit of one-party rule.

 

[TonyClifton]

Does my hair look okay to you?

Do you think that I should brush it a few times?

Maybe I should shave today.

What do you think?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

This is a crime, not photoshop!

 

[Wat_Tyler]

I say that big talk’s worth doodly-squat!

Nicely done, btw.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I snuck up on him!

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I've never assumed him to be a rational man. Instead, a dedicated and clever hardcore stealth commie. He grew up being mentored by them while absorbing the strident black liberation theology of the Rev, Wright. The only thing that keeps him from going "uncle Joe" on us is millions upon millions of armed Americans.

It is a generationally shared delusion. I had Candi and Sean blasting me for the sins of our generation being visited upon them and I had to agree because in my youth, I thought the exact same way as they do now...

I wanted to crush the Leave it to Beaver world as badly as they do now.

Fiscal Cliff --> Cloward-Piven

 

[Wat_Tyler]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

You can find him in Texas.