The Monday Jolt has much on the shutdown-averting deal and another thought on Trump, but we’ll begin with the least surprising tax proposal of the year:
Hey… Tax Day’s coming. You’re welcome.
Tax Hikes? From This President? We Never Would Have Guessed!
And here’s one president who is probably downright giddy when mid-April arrives; I’m surprised he doesn’t go to the IRS office mail rooms, just to watch the bags and bags of checks from American taxpayers arrive.
Apparently Obama will tackle the deficit this week with a fresh, original, and groundbreaking approach: giving a big, long, heavily-hyped speech about it. Yeah, you saw that one coming, didn’t you?
Credit Politico; somehow they still manage to feign excitement and enthusiasm for the umpteenth Gettysburg Address of Our Time: “President Barack Obama will lay out a long-term deficit reduction plan this week, White House senior adviser David Plouffe said Sunday. “The president will be laying out his approach to long-term deficit reduction later this week,” Plouffe said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” adding that Obama’s budget for 2012 has already put forward a plan for reducing the deficit by a trillion dollars over the next 10 years. White House communications director Dan Pfieffer later added that Obama would deliver the address on Wednesday. Plouffe said that Obama has already put in place much of his deficit commission’s recommendations, but he plans to lay out additional steps that need to be taken in this week’s speech. “For instance, freezing the pay of federal workers for a period of time…Fundamental reform of the government…We obviously then have to do more,” Plouffe said. “And that’s what the president’s gonna lay out.” Plouffle also indicated that Obama would propose rescinding the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy as part of his deficit reduction plan.”
He never did it with heavy Democrat majorities in the House and Senate; what makes him think that House or Senate Republicans will be eager to raise taxes?
Quick perspective: Using numbers from the U.S. Treasury, we see that the debt during Bush’s eight years in office increased from $5.7 trillion to $10.6 trillion, or $4.9 trillion over eight years. That’s bad; that’s basically $610 billion per year. But in the less than three years Obama has been in office, the debt has increased from $10.6 trillion to $14.2 trillion, a $3.6 trillion increase in about 27 months.
Hey, everybody, relax about that debt thing! The same guy who said the stimulus projects were shovel-ready and that everybody could keep their doctor and current plan under Obamacare says he’s gonna nail down this deficit first thing in the morning! He and Sheriff Joe will straighten this right out!
Unsurprisingly, conservative bloggers are skeptical that the president who has managed such an acceleration of runaway spending is willing to do anything to slow it down in the slightest. Doug Ross scoffs, “Let me be the very first to predict that Obama’s efforts at deficit reduction will be about as successful as a Nissan Versa’s ability to stop the Sendai Tsunami. The Democrat Party is the federal bureaucracy. Any attempts to slash the latter mortally wounds the former. And remember: the public sector union bosses spent tens of millions of dollars electing Obama in 2008. And he’s counting on the unions to pony up hundreds of million in 2012. So there’s as much chance of Obama slashing the size of government as there is Michael Moore begging off a second helping of mashed potatoes.”
William Teach at the Pirate’s Cove credits the Teleprompter of the United States for the upcoming speech and declares, “Said address will certainly have to be shoe-horned in between parties, golf, campaign events, perhaps a few days in Williamsburg, some more campaigning… Plouffe forgot to say that Obama would do anything other than give a speech. He doesn’t say Obama will offer any sort of written plan, asking Congress and the American people to take a peek and see what they think. Like virtually every other Obama “priority”, Obama will say “what I want to do is” and tell someone else to do the actual hard lifting. News flash for you, Champ: you don’t have Nancy Pelosi carrying your water as House Speaker anymore.”
Once again, if you subscribe to the Jolt and it suddenly stop getting it one day, . or if you have any tech problems or issues, e-mail Russ at rjenkins@nationalreview.com. Because if you send your ‘hey, why didn’t I get my e-mail?’ message to me, you’ll get my usual “uh… did you check your spam folder?” response. He can, at the very least, check to make sure the e-mail address is still on the distribution list. And when it does get fixed, remember to thank him!