Barack Obama has finally become the uniter he claimed he wanted to be when he ran for President four years ago. All is took was a budget that jacked up taxes by nearly $2 trillion and still created a deficit of over $1.3 trillion. Fans of responsible government have already taken their whacks at the President’s Fantasy Budget, but now the Democrats have lined up to take their shots. Not surprisingly, their complaints come from a completely different angle.
Take the comments of Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO, Home of the Sugar-Coated Satan Sandwich) as an example. Rep. Cleaver is not upset because the President waged open war on job creators while the black unemployment rate is headed toward 14 percent like it was strapped to the back of a Saturn V rocket. He’s upset because the President didn’t spend enough (via The Right Scoop).
“This budget is a nervous breakdown on paper,” said Cleaver during an interview on CNN’s “Starting Point” Monday morning. “We’re still in a recession, we’re still struggling. Unemployment is still too high,” he said.
The Missouri lawmaker said he understood the need for Congress to rein in spending. “We do have a serious ailment as a nation and certainly as Congress,” he said. “We suffer from ‘spendicitis.’ ” But Cleaver said the president was not “the one who spread this disease” and had inherited those problems when he came to office.
While he praised Obama for attempting to tackle challenging fiscal issues, Cleaver feared GOP pressure “for the federal government to turn the spigot off completely” could push the nation “deeper” into economic turmoil.
It’s worth remembering here that no one has seriously proposed that Washington”turn off the spigot completely”. That is a towering strawman that progressives like Cleaver build to make people think that we responsible government types want to shutter all of the Federal government so that Grandma has to eat Alpo for dinner. The most ambitious serious spending plan, the Mack Penny Plan proposed last year, would cut the budget by a paltry one percent each year for the next six years. That would hardly drive Washington into penury.
As I wrote on Monday, Harry Reid won’t bring the President’s budget to a vote (or even to debate), so the grousing about it may be academic. That doesn’t mean we should stop. No President should ever use a federal budget as a weapon to destroy law-abiding, productive, responsible American citizens, yet that is what President Obama has done. His aggressive dislike toward wealth earned through honest entrepreneurship has put him on the bad side of anyone who relishes their freedom to chart their own course in life. What’s worse is that he telegraphed this attack years ago.
In an April 2008 debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama made remarks that instantly became famous. Moderator Charlie Gibson asked Obama if history shows cutting capital gains taxes increases revenues and raising capital gains taxes decreases revenues–and Gibson read Obama the history of raising and cutting capital gains taxes to demonstrate this was so–would he still want to raise capital gains taxes?
“Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness,” Obama answered. That is, not only does the evidence against his plan not deter him from instituting it, but the facts were never even a part of the calculation. He was not concerned with economics or history; ideology was his only consideration.
That ought to upset Democrats, because it shoves their normal class warfare arguments out of the spotlight and pulls raw, dripping progressive ideology into it. Rep. Cleaver may be the tip of the Iceberg of Sorrow here. If that’s true, and the big government crowd is unhappy about the President’s budget, then that’s good news for the rest of us.
We have only to make sure that the ideology stays in the spotlight for a while longer. Surely that can bring us together.
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