From Tuesday night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On the political impact of the debt ceiling debate and agreement:
One of the great achievements here is that the debt ceiling is no longer a nullity. The Democrats are arguing, ‘Well why are we doing this? We’ve raised it 78 times since 1960 without anything happening.’ Yes, that’s the point. That’s why we are in the trouble that we are today. We went 40 years ignoring what really was happening every time we raised the debt ceiling.
Well now, because of the Boehner rule — which he invented on his own out of whole cloth in that speech he gave at the New York Economic Club a few months ago in which he said a dollar of debt ceiling increase has to be matched by a dollar of spending cuts (which, Jay Carney is right, there’s no logical connection, but now there is a political indelible connection) — every time the debt ceiling will come up, there’s going to be a debate in the country. This is a real success.
On President Obama’s proposed job-creation initiatives:
An index of how spent he is intellectually on the issue of jobs is the campaign speech he gave today – the fourth in ten days in which he pivoted and he announced five initiatives. Listen to them:
– Payroll tax extension — we already had that.
– Unemployment insurance extension — already had that.
– Trade deals — he’s had it for two and a half years and done nothing.
– Spending, more infrastructure, a perennial, you know — more dams, more bridges and roads.
– And the last one, I love that — here’s the real new one that will get us out of our doldrums: patent process reform!
He’s out of bullets. He’s out of arrows. He’s looking for stones on the seashore. … There’s nothing left in the cupboard. He did a huge Keynesian gamble, and it failed.