Last night, towards the end of his speech to the nation, President Obama recalled Thomas Jefferson\u2019s aphorism on making legislation: \u201cEvery man cannot have his way in all things.\u201d<\/p>\n
The president was trying to pin the intransigence blame on House Republicans, particularly Tea Party freshmen.\u00a0 But he did it in a speech in which he gave not one inch of ground on his own positions.<\/p>\n
In effect, Mr. Obama said last night that he would not accept a plan in which there were no tax increases.\u00a0 Then he detailed a number of spending cuts he would not accept.\u00a0 Outside of cutting defense, which he supports, it wasn\u2019t at all clear that there was any cut to any spending in any part of the federal establishment that the president would endorse.<\/p>\n
This has been Washington\u2019s problem for months.\u00a0 Having boosted the federal take on the gross national product from 20% to 25% in his first two years in office (a peacetime record), the president is now unwilling to contemplate any retrenchment.\u00a0 It has become clear that all the administration\u2019s spending has not bought the nation an escape from record high levels of unemployment.\u00a0 Many economists believe that all this massive spending and regulation have significantly hurt the economy, not helped it.<\/p>\n
That view was summed up by entrepreneur and executive Steve Wynn last week, when in a widely reported conference call he told investors:<\/p>\n
\u201c[The president] keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, their holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth,\u2026 and I am a Democratic businessman\u2026. And I’m telling you that the business community in this [country] is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.\u201d<\/p>\n
As if to confirm Wynn\u2019s analysis, Goldman Sachs reported last week that, at the cost of declining earnings, over each of the last six quarters it has decreased the value that its trading desk has had at risk on any given day. \u00a0Reasons cited included increasing regulation, financial shakiness in Europe and fiscal uncertainty in the U.S.<\/p>\n
And yet, despite warnings from economists like Hoover Institution\u2019s John Cogan and Michael Boskin, despite confirming signals from the financial and business worlds, despite the worst recovery of employment from any downturn since the end of the Second World War, the president, in effect, cried out last night \u201cfull speed ahead.\u201d\u00a0 He would not turn course in the slightest.<\/p>\n
And not turning course includes not putting specific debt reduction plans on the table.\u00a0 The administration talks in generalities (mainly \u201ctax the rich\u201d), but offers no details.\u00a0 This passivity is without precedent since the rise of the modern presidency and perhaps in the history of our country.\u00a0 The White House has no operative budget proposal on the table and hasn\u2019t since the Senate rejected by a vote of 97-0 the budget it submitted earlier this year.\u00a0 That budget called for vastly increasing spending again in the coming year.<\/p>\n
Despite the president\u2019s line last night that the fault for the impasse lies with the House GOP, the view is growing in Washington that the president is the source of the problem.\u00a0 Thanks to his lack of serious legislative and executive experience, he has never learned how to conduct a high stakes negotiation.\u00a0\u00a0 His insulting treatment of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan at the start of the current talks was an example.\u00a0 Who in the White House thought it would be a good move to invite Ryan to the president\u2019s first speech on the debt talks, seat him in the first row, and then use the address to insult him?<\/p>\n
Where do we go from here?\u00a0 If, as reported, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been trying to put together an all-cuts-no-taxes deal, it is likely because some members of the Democratic caucus are demanding it.\u00a0 Those members would surely include Democrats such as Nebraska\u2019s Ben Nelson who are from heavily GOP states and are up for reelection next year.\u00a0 Add to them red state Democratic senators who are up in 2014 and some Democrats with similar views who are retiring from the Senate this year and it is possible to see a spending-cut-no-taxes bill passing Congress, a bill that the administration had virtually no role in developing.<\/p>\n
After Mr. Obama\u2019s speech last night, that\u2019s my bet right now.\u00a0 The president said \u201cmy way or the highway.\u201d\u00a0 Congress is hearing the call of the open road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night, towards the end of his speech to the nation, President Obama recalled Thomas Jefferson\u2019s aphorism on making legislation: \u201cEvery man cannot have his way in all things.\u201d The president was trying to pin the intransigence blame on House Republicans, particularly Tea Party freshmen.\u00a0 But he did it in a speech in which he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-debt-crisis","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=909"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":928,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions\/928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}