From Monday night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On the Republicans’ options to resolve the debt ceiling impasse:
They are going to have to make a choice. They are losing the public relations battle. Obama managed, together with the support of a supine press — but that is like the sun rising in the east; it’s going to happen all the time — Obama has managed to spin this into, ‘I am reasonable, and the extremists among Republicans are going to put us into default.’
It seems to me there is one way out. It’s sitting there. I’m shocked that the Republicans haven’t acted on this. They need to pass a short-term — again, say, half a trillion dollars. ‘We will give you five months, cuts only.’
There is no way Obama can veto it with any reasonable argument.
The reason he wants to go long — [is that] he wants the big deal. He wants a big deal because it means he won’t have the issue arise again until the election. It’s purely a partisan political maneuver on his part. It is indefensible. If the Republicans pass a short-term [spending] cut, they reverse the public relations on this, and they actually could get a [spending] cut.
On Senator Tom Coburn’s new $9 trillion deficit reduction proposal to cut spending by 20-25%:
Juan is saying it’s impossible to cut the size of government by 20 percent. Obama in two and a half years increased it by over 20 percent — discretionary spending. It’s way, way up. All that Coburn is doing is reverting to pre-Obama.
Second, what Coburn is doing about increasing revenue is not new. He supported the recommendation of the Bowles-Simpson commission, which included within it tax reform, meaning you lower the rates, you eliminate the loopholes. So you raise the revenue with the loopholes, then you return the revenue to the ordinary citizen in tax cuts. … And then you get 1986, a deal between Reagan and Tip O’Neill, which gave us a quarter century of almost uninterrupted economic expansion.