Thoughts from Daniel Henninger:
the lumpen electorate works, and the lumpen bureaucratariat spends. They get away with it because they have perfected the illusion that no human hand causes these commitments. The payroll tax just happens. Entitlements are “off-budget,” presumably in the hands of God. This is government without the responsibility of governance.
Unable to identify who or what has put them in hock to the horizon, national electorates are attempting accountability by voting whole parties out of power. Rasmussen recently found that 57% of voters would throw out Congress en masse if they could. Gerrymandered districts ensure that they can’t.
Problem is, the lumpen bureaucratariat can’t stop spending and borrowing and won’t incentivize growth. Amid the phenomenal spending on the financial mess here, they tried to pass a cap-and-trade bill whose centerpiece was an auction of carbon credits to flow trillions of dollars toward the bureaucracies. Mr. Obama’s people seem weirdly oblivious to the scale of their outlays, programs and dreams.
Something has to give.
[Update a few minutes later]
Will Obamacare be to Obama what Spain was to Napoleon?
Unable to identify who or what has put them in hock to the horizon, national electorates are attempting accountability by voting whole parties out of power.
It isn’t too hard to see who’s responsible for the debt situation. But there are plenty of people, the quoted writer included, who’d rather cloud the issue because it suits their ideology.
Amid the phenomenal spending on the financial mess here, they tried to pass a cap-and-trade bill whose centerpiece was an auction of carbon credits to flow trillions of dollars toward the bureaucracies.
If only. Instead, Waxman-Markey gives 85% of the credits to existing emitters.
Mr. Obama’s people seem weirdly oblivious to the scale of their outlays, programs and dreams.
In terms of fiscal impact Obama’s plans are modest compared to Bush’s tax cuts + Medicare Part D + Iraq. This writer seems oblivious to arithmetic.
Fiscal impact != economic impact.
Most people not of the left regard economic impact as the more important of the two.
There’s a saying going back to the late Stxties, “limousine liberals.” I believe it was coined by someone working for Mario Procaccino’s mayoral campaign in New York City, to describe Mayor John Lindsay, a haughty upper-crust RINO who eventually turned Democrat and who obviously favored the revenue-consuming underclass over the revenue-producing middle- and working-classes. I propose a new term: “lorgnette liberals,” to describe the New Tories whose reaction to the Obama Era Tea Parties evokes images of ” toffs” in powdered wigs looking down through their lorgnettes at the participants in the original Tea Party. “Oh, my, Sir Percy–it appears the rabble is restless.” “I know, my dear Baronet–they just haven’t learned to submit gracefully to their betters.”
“Jim” probably would be following them around tugging his forelock and saying, “Right you are, guv’nors! Filthy rabble, all of them! Makes the blood of honest serfs like me boil just to hear their complaining! Polish your boots, gentlemen?”