President Obama, amid his serial calls for civility, now, in his customary style, uses a gun-to-the-head metaphor to characterize his political adversaries. He has increased the national debt by nearly $5 trillion dollars. He most recently proposed a budget with a $1.6 trillion annual deficit, after trying to borrow even more. His allies in Congress do not wish even to propose a budget, given the new D.C. wisdom that pruning back some of the annual $1.6 trillion in borrowing is synonymous with a horrific cut aimed at the poor, the needy, and the deserving, and unfairly benefits those jet owners who make $250,000 or more per year (which might pay for a new wheel on a Gulfstream). Amid this surreal landscape is the fact that in 2006, then-senator Obama gave a demagogic speech explaining why he would not vote to raise the debt ceiling, when the annual deficit and aggregate debt were far smaller and the economy far stronger than is the case now. All this so-called stimulatory massive borrowing has after nearly three years given us a 9.2 percent unemployment rate, despite boasting from the president, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, et al. that by now there would be, in the words of Van Jones, “millions of new green jobs.”
This is all scary.