Thoughts on the collective, from Iowahawk:
Oh, Melissa Harris-Perry? I have a rule. Unless you’re my wife, there ain’t no such thing as “our children.”
Remember Hillary’s “It Takes A Village“? Same thing.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Obama’s Budget
That is, its failure:
Let’s start with the bottom line. Obama proposes to spend $3.78 trillion dollars in FY2014, the highest level of spending ever. Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards calculates this against the budget that preceded Obama’s term in office, the FY2008 budget that was the last to get a signature from George W. Bush. Obama’s proposal increases spending by 27 percent over those six years and by 8 percent over the last normal-order budget for FY2010.
This increase comes despite Obama’s promises to introduce budget and deficit discipline, and in defiance of voters who want the federal government to reduce spending. It comes after the initiation of the budget sequester, which was supposed to lop off a mere $85 billion in spending each year for the next decade, which would have been just 2.3 percent of last year’s budget. Instead, this proposal would increase spending by $154 billion, almost twice what sequestration was supposed to save taxpayers.
So much for a multi-year approach to fiscal discipline! Obama’s budget bypasses the very sequester his White House demanded and got in 2011. AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis pointed out that Obama’s own budget office projected that the new budget proposal would lead to a balanced budget by … 2055. That assumes, of course, that whatever savings Obama claims to make in this budget will last 41 years longer than the sequester savings did.
Needless to say, Republicans on Capitol Hill were not impressed.
Well, his gall is impressive.
And then there’s the criticism from the nutjob left:
The Economic Ignorance
Our Current Leaders
How awful they are. It’s hard to think of any current American elected politician who holds a candle to Margaret Thatcher.
The Litigation Procrastination
There was supposed to be a hearing to decide whether or not to dismiss the Mannsuit on Thursday morning. We just learned that the court has postponed it until June 19th.
IQ Tests For Politicians
Of course, it would almost empty the current Senate. Not to mention the White House (and Naval Observatory).
Beyond ObamaCare
Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin respond to their critics:
The first thing to note is that none of our critics actually defend Obamacare, and therefore none dispute the argument of the piece. Their dispute is entirely with what we propose instead — which our piece of course lays out only briefly and broadly, since we assumed that the argument that replacement is still the right way to think about things first had to be made. Their lack of interest in defending the law is interesting. Do they agree with us that Obamacare cannot work as enacted? Do they agree that piecemeal reforms will not work and Obamacare must be replaced? If they do, do they imagine that the party that forced this unpopular law down the country’s throat will be trusted to fix or replace it once it fails?
If they don’t agree that Obamacare is untenable (as we assume at least some of them don’t), how would they defend it? Do they not think it is headed for an insurance death spiral? Do they not think the financial incentives it sets up will result in far higher federal spending and far fewer insured Americans than its advocates promised? Do they think it will lower premium costs? Is it sustainable over time? Have you seen much of a substantive answer from the left to these commonly voiced concerns?
The critics of our piece offer no such answers, and actually suggest that we’re wasting our time repeating the obvious case against Obamacare. Several of them want to get right to a debate about what should replace it. That’s great. Not all of them, though, want to discuss the solution we pointed to. Kevin Drum acknowledges (twice) that he didn’t actually read our piece; he just read Yglesias and Klein (who just summarized Yglesias) and “sighed.” We know the feeling.
Don’t we all?
John McCain, Senate Novice
I guess we shouldn’t expect any better of him — after all, he’s only been in the Senate for a quarter of a century — but he apparently needs to be told that the purpose of a filibuster is not to prevent debate, but to prevent its end.
Skeptical Of Skeptical Science
Bob Tisdale has a rebuttal to their latest nonsense.
[Update a while later]
Note that we seem to have attracted a cowardly anonymous (and apparently not very bright) troll in comments, who seems unable to address the actual content of this post.
Gun Control
The great fizzle:
…the assault weapons ban has been deep-sixed by Democrats in the Senate. Same with any limit on the size of magazines. The argument now is all about increasing the reach of background checks, although any bill that can pass the Senate and the House will be much less extensive than the president or his supporters would like.
The gun control debate has shown the president again to be hopelessly detached as a legislative mechanic and ineffectual as a shaper of public opinion. Before writing rhetorical checks that his own party’s majority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, couldn’t cash, the president might have at least consulted with the wily old son-of-a-gun about what was plausible and adjusted accordingly. He might have taken into consideration Reid’s ribbon-cutting ceremony with National Rifle Association honcho Wayne LaPierre at the Clark County Shooting Park in Las Vegas in 2010.
Once again, we’re saved from the fecklessness of the electorate by his incompetence.