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Jewish World Review Jan. 3, 2013/ 23 Teves, 5773 Winning ugly: Obama and the fiscal cliff By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | By all accounts, President Obama won the fiscal cliff showdown. Why anyone would take much pride in this kind of "win" is beyond me. It's a bit like being the least filthy toddler in the mud pit. One of the main reasons Obama won, according not only to Obama but an at times cheering press, is that he had a mandate. He ran on the need for the wealthy to "pay their fair share." To his credit, Obama never said raising taxes on the "rich" will solve all of our problems. What he did say, however, is that he couldn't in good conscience ask seniors and college students to take a hit from budget cuts without asking the wealthy to pay their fair share. He wanted "shared sacrifice" and a "balanced approach" because we're "all in it together." Here is what Obama said in his weekly address on "This is not class warfare," Obama said in September of 2011. "It's math." He continued: "Either we ask the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share in taxes, or we're going to have to ask seniors to pay more for And here's what he said just days after he was re-elected: "But as I've said before, we can't just cut our way to prosperity. If we're serious about reducing the deficit, we have to combine spending cuts with revenue. And that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes. That's how we did in the 1990s, when Now, I have plenty of disagreements with all of this. The president seems to think that if he calls class warfare "math," it's suddenly not class warfare. Also, the man's version of the last two decades of economic history has always struck me as at best flawed and more properly speaking barmy. During the campaign he assiduously worked to give the impression that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by Also, the idea that the rich hadn't been paying their fair share is at least debatable. When Obama took office in 2009, the richest 5 percent of Americans paid almost 40 percent of all federal taxes, and the richest 1 percent paid 22 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If you count only federal income taxes, the top 5 percent and top 1 percent paid, respectively, 59 percent and 37 percent. But none of that matters. Obama was re-elected on a twofold promise. Part one was to make the wealthy pay their fair share. Part two: fix our debt crisis, which Obama himself has conceded is chiefly driven by entitlement spending. Right or wrong, he's done part one, according to the standards he laid out in the campaign (although he did want to raise taxes on incomes starting at Heck, the deal actually increases spending and the national debt. So clearly, promise number two remains unfulfilled.
Moreover, at the last minute, before the deal was even agreed to, Obama insisted that any future deficit-reduction package must include even more tax hikes. It's clear that the Republicans mishandled this whole fiasco. If they were going to lose on tax hikes anyway, they might as well have lost early and spent the last month pounding Obama on the second part of his promise. Meanwhile, if the press corps can take a break from celebrating Obama's victory over those crazy Republicans who want to keep us from going bankrupt, they might start asking Obama about the rest of his mandate.
© 2006 TMS |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
