The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Part of the Problem

President Obama’s legion of supporters in the legacy media (a.k.a. main stream media) spend very little time reporting on Greece's on-going fiscal crisis and imminent default. When they do report the story, they treat the riots in the streets, the delusional demands of trade unions, and the irrational shouts of significant portion of the entitled Greek electorate as an abstraction. Don’t worry, the media seems to conclude, the hard-pressed Euros will bail out Greece in the 11th hour. Or not.

The reason that Obama’s media refuses to cover the story is obvious. It’s a harbinger of our story here in the good ol’ US of A. At the current rate of federal spending and the current trajectory of US budget deficits, we’ll become Greece in 5 or 10 years—entitlement riots, union shutdowns, and real draconian cuts on those who do need assistance. Greece is a look into our future, and the left-leaning media would prefer not to allow the American public to look in that direction.

Meanwhile, our debt limit talks grind on. The President and his party have proposed no written plan (The opposition has proposed two in the last 6 weeks)and appear to be more concerned with frightening the American public with ridiculous and misleading suggestions that social security checks will not be delivered post-August 2nd. They working hard to demonize the opposition and have laid the foundation for blame, but have shown virtually no leadership on the important matter.

Philosophically, the President seems committed to more spending (“investments”) now and “savings” (he has trouble uttering the phrase “spending cuts”) sometime in the distant post-election future. Grinding debt? No worries. Greece? Can’t happen here.

The Wall Street Journal says it all:
… it has long been clear that Mr. Obama isn't interested in spending reform. In February he proposed a budget that spent more than any in U.S. history. In April he demanded that Congress pass a "clean" debt ceiling hike that included no spending cuts whatsoever. Only after House Republicans unveiled their own sweeping budgetary reforms did the White House rush to also claim it wanted deficit reduction as part of the debt-ceiling debate.

In June, the President dispatched Joe Biden to negotiate spending cuts, only to have the White House insist at the last minute that modest trims be accompanied by significant new taxes. Mr. Boehner and the Senate's bipartisan Gang of Six produced plans that would have acceded to that White House demand in exchange for substantive tax reform that would have lowered individual and corporate rates. Yet last week the White House backtracked on its agreement for the lower tax rates and demanded another $400 billion in tax revenues above the $800 billion the Speaker had already conceded.

The President insists his party is offering serious spending cuts and entitlement reform. He also likes to talk about "balance," which to him means real tax increases immediately and speculative spending cuts some time in the distant future. Behind the scenes the White House has only ever agreed to token reform and cuts. Here's a number for the debt history books: Mr. Obama's final offer in the Biden talks was a $2 billion cut in 2012 nondefense discretionary spending. The federal government spends more than $10 billion a day.

Now we're days from the August 2 default deadline set by the Treasury Department, and the President's only response has been to blame everybody else for deficient seriousness.

Never in my lifetime have I seen a president—any president—abrogate his leadership position as completely as Barack Obama. Never in my lifetime have I seen a president—any president—angle so obviously for partisan advantage to the detriment of the country he should be leading. Never in my lifetime have I seen a president—any president— stretch the truth as blatantly as this one (e.g., Obamacare will us save money or taxing “millionaires and billionaires” will have a substantive impact on our deficits, or the military will not be paid after August 2nd.

The economy and the country are in trouble. And whether he likes it or not, Barack Obama is part of the problem, not part of the cure.