Obama’s Wild Distortions & Dishonesty While Biden Sleeps… WSJ Slams President’s “Toxic Speech” on Ryan’s Budget & Being Fiscally Responsible
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on April 14, 2011
VP Joe Biden falls asleep yesterday during Barack Obama's speech on the deficit/debt
Vice President Joe Biden took a little nap while the nation was aghast at Pres. Obama’s attacking, appalling deficit/debt “reduction” speech yesterday.
Joe is just one heartbeat, er, one cat nap away from the presidency. As America’s prosperity and our children’s futures are being flushed away by our clueless Community Organizer in Chief.
Bye, bye, American Dream.
Wall Street Journal on Pres. Barack Obama's deficit/debt speech: said it was 'toxic' and POTUS 'packaged his poison in the rhetoric of bipartisanship'
Ready, aim, fire… at least one major media source is disgusted at the president’s speech. No, not Chris “Tingles” Matthews.
Opening to the no-holding-back critique posted by Wall Street Journal, The Presidential Divider, Obama’s toxic speech and even worse plan for deficits and debt:
Did someone move the 2012 election to June 1? We ask because President Obama’s extraordinary response to Paul Ryan’s budget yesterday—with its blistering partisanship and multiple distortions—was the kind Presidents usually outsource to some junior lieutenant. Mr. Obama’s fundamentally political document would have been unusual even for a Vice President in the fervor of a campaign.
The immediate political goal was to inoculate the White House from criticism that it is not serious about the fiscal crisis, after ignoring its own deficit commission last year and tossing off a $3.73 trillion budget in February that increased spending amid a record deficit of $1.65 trillion. Mr. Obama was chased to George Washington University yesterday because Mr. Ryan and the Republicans outflanked him on fiscal discipline and are now setting the national political agenda.
Mr. Obama did not deign to propose an alternative to rival Mr. Ryan’s plan, even as he categorically rejected all its reform ideas, repeatedly vilifying them as essentially un-American. “Their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America,” he said, supposedly pitting “children with autism or Down’s syndrome” against “every millionaire and billionaire in our society.” The President was not attempting to join the debate Mr. Ryan has started, but to close it off just as it begins and banish House GOP ideas to political Siberia.
Mr. Obama then packaged his poison in the rhetoric of bipartisanship—which “starts,” he said, “by being honest about what’s causing our deficit.” The speech he chose to deliver was dishonest even by modern political standards.
Mr. Obama said that the typical political proposal to rationalize Medicare’s gargantuan liabilities is that it is “just a matter of eliminating waste and abuse.” His own plan is to double down on the program’s price controls and central planning. All Medicare decisions will be turned over to and routed through an unelected commission created by ObamaCare—which will supposedly ferret out “unnecessary spending.” Is that the same as “waste and abuse”?
There’s much more… go here to read the rest of the WSJ’s brutal appraisal of the POTUS speech.
On our “Sleeping Beauty VP”… from ABC News, Asleep on the Job: What Was Vice President Joe Biden Doing During Obama’s Debt Speech?:
Vice President Biden chose an inopportune time for either a nap or some deep reflection today.
[...]
Biden, at one point, could be seen apparently nodding off — or at least deep in thought. The bug was catching, too. The woman in glasses directly behind Biden appears to close her eyes too.
Mark Steyn lands his punches on the president’s speech at National Review, Cometh the Hour, Punteth the Man:
There’s something sad about a man so carelessly revealing himself as entirely inadequate to the moment. Government spending is an existential threat to the United States. Whether or not anyone at the White House knows this, the viziers decided to shove the sultan out on stage with a pitifully unserious speech retreating to all his lamest tropes – the usual whiny, petty and unpresidential partisan snippiness, and the ponderous demolition of straw men even he barely bothered to pretend he believed in.
Politicians are often eager to feed the impression that solving the problem is just a matter of eliminating waste and abuse –that tackling the deficit issue won’t require tough choices.
Yeah, right. Why don’t we start by eliminating whatever dope got paid to write that sentence?
This speech failed Rich’s “What’s yours?” test. In fact, it more or less declared to the world that this Administration has no plan, and has no plan to plan on getting a plan anytime soon. But America is not Greece. There is no Germany to bail us out. Only we can do it. And the President just signaled to the world that that’s not going to happen.
From William Teach at Pirate’s Cove, Obama’s Deficit Speech To Be About Sharing The Pain Democrats Created?:
As for “shared prosperity and shared responsibility,” the former sounds kinda commie, doesn’t it? The second, well, the people who should be sharing in that are the idiots who voted Democrats into power in 2006, and Obama in 2008, which led to approximately $5 trillion in new federal debt since Nancy Pelosi took the gavel, and added over a trillion dollars to the federal deficit during Obama’s first year in office.
Suggesting: if you liberals want to be part of the “shared responsibility”, you are welcome to send your own money voluntarily to the IRS. You’ve been made this offer ever since you started whining about the “Bush tax cuts for the rich.” Yet, you don’t. Why is that? Furthermore, I suggest changing the federal tax forms to allow people to formally pay a higher tax rate, such as they do in Massachusetts (where almost no one bothers to pay the higher rate, despite there being so many liberals). Come on, Liberals, do you part. Triple dog dare you!
Anyhow, do not expect much in the way of details today. He’ll give his speech, and then expect Congress to follow his “vision”, while he heads off to some parties, campaign events, vacations, and some golf.
From Moe Lane, I am *done* with President Obama:
My recommendation, going forward? Democrats: cut the President out of the loop. His presence in this discussion insults both parties at this point. Send him off to a permanent round of golf games and trips to various parts of the country: Obama hates his job anyway, so letting him know that from now on all he has to do is sign papers on cue will probably relieve him somewhat. In the meantime… well, God help us, there’s always Joe Biden* for domestic policy. I am disgusted that we are now in a situation where going with Joe Biden looks good as a strategy in comparison, but this is where we are now…
*Yes. I know he fell asleep. He’d still be an improvement. And may God save the Republic.
From The Other McCain, It’s a ‘Framework,’ Not a ‘Plan’:
A very old Beltway trick: First, project the budget waaaayyy out in the future, where hypothetical rates of economic growth are always robust, revenue gains are inevitably encouraging and political opposition magically vanishes.
Next, propose reductions in spending that only get semi-drastic in the far-off-in-the-future years of such a forecast.
Voila! You’ve “reduced the deficit” by an Impressively Large Number!
Except, of course, that you haven’t done any such thing. Because (a) the anticipated economic growth never matches the hypothetical forecast, (b) the cuts in spending you “projected” to make six, eight, 10 years in the future don’t actually happen, and instead (c) spending continues to grow due to what’s known as “baseline budgeting.”
So it’s easy as pie to do what Team Obama has done here: Propose $4 trillion in deficit-reduction over 12 years, which when you do the math only amounts to $333 billion a year in spending “cuts” (or tax increases), except that trying to apply math to this “framework” is hopeless, because we’ve got no freaking clue what the economy is going to be doing in 2022 — by which time, of course, Obama will have long since become a very wealthy ex-president who can play golf even more than he does now.
From American Spectator, The Obama Tax Hike Machete:
In his deficit reduction “vision” speech on Wednesday, President Obama tried to distinguish his plan from that of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan by using a rather crude analogy. The president said, “We have to use a scalpel and not a machete to reduce the deficit.”
But when it comes to tax hikes — to extend the analogy — the Obama administration’s 2012 budget is charging at business partnerships of all sizes with what could be described as a Texas-size guillotine.
The blunt instrument in Obama’s proposed fiscal year budget unveiled last February — a budget that he referenced on Wednesday as the blueprint for his deficit plan — is a proposal to tax much of the capital gains of a partnership as ordinary income as well as subject them to hefty payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security. This would more than triple taxes in many cases from the current top capital gains rate of 15 percent to the top personal income tax rate of 35 percent. Or actually 39.6 percent, since Obama would let the Bush tax rates expire too.
[...]
Ironically, by stifling venture capital and innovative partnerships, Obama’s carried interest tax hike would also be cutting the lifeline of some of the very types of businesses he champions, such as “green energy.” Folks peddling windmills and biofuels are getting tons of funding from venture capital and angel investors, as well as arguably more deserving entrepreneurs.
In short, Obama’s tax hikes on innovation and entrepreneurship are a recipe for, to borrow his phrasing, losing the future.
From Ace of Spades HQ, A Quick Little Shot of DOOM!:
President Obama’s speech didn’t exactly thrill Congressman Paul Ryan, who’d been specifically invited to attend. You might say that Obama’s partisan, hectoring, mean-spirited speech pissed him right off, in fact. It’s kind of like being invited to a party only to find that the point of the whole party was to insult you.
The WSJ wasn’t feeling the love either. Our very own Ace shat on it from a great height yesterday. The Hammer thought it was “a disgrace”. So to whatever juiceboxer Obama detailed to write that abomination of a speech, congratulations! You certainly had an impact!
[...]
And yes…California and Illinois are still boned.
[UPDATE 1]: Here’s a good policy-level discussion of what Obama’s budget alternative really means in fiscal terms. (I can summarize it: much higher taxes, not much in terms of reduced spending. And it doesn’t touch entitlement spending at all.)
From Legal Insurrection, Hand-to-Hand Combat Has Started:
Barack Obama promised us hand-to-hand combat, and his speech yesterday was the start.
The nation is facing a debt crisis of historic proportions, but nothing will be done because Obama already has launched his presidential campaign. A compromise must included serious changes to unsustainable entitlements which are swamping the Treasury. Yet Obama took any significant changes off the table yesterday, by channeling Alan Grayson’s charge that Republicans want people to die quickly.
By contrast, Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the top 2% will not make a dent in the problem, even assuming the static analysis of $700 billion in additional revenue over 10 years. That 10-year number doesn’t even close the budget deficit for this year. And of course, life is not static, and the projected revenue does not take into account changes in behaviour to avoid taxes, what I’ve termed the revolt of the kulaks.
Rockford, Illinois tea party rally, April 2010 | Photo credit: Larry
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