By Jeremy Lott on 5.26.09 @ 6:08AM
President Obama has handed his opponents a bludgeon the size of
Thor's hammer.
President Barack Obama handed his political opponents a bludgeon
the size of Thor's hammer Saturday.
In a story played up by the Drudge Report but virtually ignored
by the New York Times and Washington
Post, C-SPAN's Steve Scully pointed to the massive
financial obligations taken on by his administration and to
America's generally lousy financial forecast. He asked Obama, "At
what point do we run out of money?" "Well…" the U.S. president
began with his practiced nod to the unhurried, unflappable style
of Ronald Reagan.
Then he said it: "We are out of money now." He tried that classic
Obama workaround, essentially conceding the opposition's point
then sidestepping it to advance his own vision. "We are operating
in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we've made on
health care so far," he said. But just wait.
Obama pegged "health care inflation" as America's long-term
fiscal problem. One unsavory option for how to deal with this
problem, he said, "is to just do nothing. We say, well, it's too
expensive for us to make some short term investments in health
care. We can't afford it. We've got this big deficit. Let's just
keep the health care system that we've got now."
He tried to make the case for why that would be the wrong option
but, by that point, nobody who wasn't already committed to his
vision of government managed, mandated, rationed health care was
paying much attention. To the average not terribly ideological
voter, the gravity of what Obama admitted will displace airy
fairy notions about the fiercely urgent need for reform now.
"We are out of money," Obama said, apparently of his own free
will. He also said that the government has had to spend "a lot of
money" to "salvage our financial system," and to "deal with the
auto companies." He admitted that that the U.S. is in the midst
of a "huge recession," which "drains tax revenue" from federal
and state coffers and puts "more pressure on governments" to
provide vital services with fewer resources.
The president might write these off, collectively, as a
"short-term problem," but it's pretty hard to admit all these
things and then convince Americans they should double down. Obama
is requesting over $600 billion in his budget for what the White
House bills as simply a "down payment" on his grander scheme of
universal coverage.
Not to beat a dead horse, but that's over $600 billion that the
U.S. government doesn't have on hand to spend. It can either
borrow the money and shift the bill, with interest, onto future,
heavily leveraged generations, or it can raise taxes to pay the
bill. Practically, there will be a mix of both. It's telling that
Obama and the congressional leadership both want more funds for
IRS enforcement so that the tax collectors can really do their
job.
All kinds of people are going to be made unhappy by the
government push for more funds, and not just the usual suspects.
Over this Memorial Day weekend, Oregon's Democratic Senator Ron
Wyden faced negative union bought ads over his proposal to tax
health care benefits -- their own member's hard negotiated
benefits, in other words -- to help finance the federal plan.
When Republicans decide to come out swinging against these plans
-- and they will; they don't have many other options -- they will
have the most clear, concise, bullet proofed slogan of all time
at their disposal. "We are out of money," they can say, so Obama
wants to take yours.
topics:
Federal Budget, Government Growth
