Posted on 02/08/2013 5:07:56 PM PST by PJ-Comix
At the beginning of the year, the media hailed Barack Obama as the winner of the standoff on the fiscal cliff – and it wasn’t difficult to see why. Obama forced House Republicans to swallow a tax-rate increase for the first time in more than a decade, breaking a vow that had been a bright line with their conservative base. Even though the President had to adjust on the baseline for the marginal tax increase from a $200,000 income level to $400,000, he successfully used the leverage of scheduled increases of tax rates in all brackets to break GOP opposition as the clock ran out.
Not everyone agreed that this was an unqualified success for President Obama and an unmitigated disaster for Republicans. Peter Orszag, once one of Obama’s closest economic advisers and his first Director of the Office of Management and Budget, wondered aloud whether Obama’s victory wouldn’t prove Pyrrhic. “It’s entirely possible,” Orszag told CNBC, “they’re going to win the week and lose the quarter,” thanks to the separation of the tax resolution from other fiscal-cliff issues such as the debt ceiling and the sequester.
As Orszag predicted, Obama won one battle, but may be losing the war. And it has become very apparent that Obama hasn’t even really prepared to fight it.
The desperation began to show this week. Barack Obama blinked first by announcing that he was requesting another postponement of the automatic cuts in order to produce a “balanced” deficit-reduction package. Congress, Obama said, “should at least pass a smaller package of spending cuts and tax reforms” instead of allowing the sequester to go through. Boehner reminded Obama that the House has twice passed such measures, only to go nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
The White House also tried taking a page from the (unsuccessful) Republican playbook of 2012 by claiming that American industry would have to lay off workers if the sequestration hit. “There is no reason,” Obama intoned, “that the jobs of thousands of Americans who work in national security or education or clean energy, not to mention the growth of the economy, should be put in jeopardy.”
Obama provided plenty of dire warnings about the damage that his own budget-gimmick proposal may do if it becomes active in less than four weeks. What Obama hasn’t provided is an actual solution for replacing his previous solution. In fact, Obama hasn’t yet provided a budget proposal for FY2014, despite having a statutory requirement to do so by now – making four budget proposals out of Obama’s five opportunities that arrived late. Instead of offering specific proposals for spending cuts to replace the sequester, Obama offered a vague demand for “tax reform” that would increase revenue again.
This deadline has been in place for months. It became clear weeks ago that Republicans would likely allow the sequester to go forward, at least long enough to put pressure on replacement cuts from Democrats, and would be in position to refuse to raise any more revenue. And yet Obama not only sounded like someone shocked out of a reverie, he offered nothing to resolve the standoff – and neither did Harry Reid and Senate Democrats, not even an offer to take up the bill approved by the House in the last session if passed again.
Boehner has triumphed in at least exposing the White House’s fumbling on spending issues – and he wasted no time in driving the point home. “Yesterday the president warned of grave economic consequences if the sequester were to go into effect, but he didn’t announce any specific plans of how he would address it,” he pointed out after Obama’s demand for a delay. “He didn’t bother to outline how he would replace the sequester, which he suggested and insisted upon in August of 2011. He didn’t even tell us when we might see his budget, which is again late, and how he would address the sequester in his budget.”
In short, the President has no plan, and no leverage. With the tax rates and Alternative Minimum Tax fixes now permanent, Obama has no more leverage to force the House into bending to his will. His one gimmick to force Republicans to cave into his demands for higher taxes and more spending just backfired, and Obama has nothing more to offer. After almost four years of budget cliffs and gimmicks, Barack Obama will have to accept that reality and get serious about budget reform on the other side of the ledger.
Did I just wake up from a thousand year slumber and find that Boner/Boehner just maybe, might have grown a pair of balls?
However, we're still in the first qtr of the game (in this particular instance) and that gives Boner/Boehner LOTS & LOTS of opportunity to run crying & sobbing back into the arms of the one he loves....RAT bastard socialist commie pig 0dumb0sh_t!
Personally I think that Boner/Boehner will roll over, cave in, capitulate & bend over to 0dumb0 on the sequester, once Odumb0 & the partisan media hacks bear down on him in earnest!
The sequester process will set into motion what I like to call the old “parade of horribles” routine. The administration will choose the most politically controversial cuts they can, then try to blame them on the GOP.
I’m reminded of a little kid back in the 50’s. He’d been one of the last polio victims, and lived in an iron lung. Every time there was a proposal to cut back some bureaucrat’s limo costs, it always transmogrified into shutting off poor little Johnny’s iron lung. The little sucker kept discovering a new threat to his life every time the legislature proposed a common sense cost reduction.
So, really, there’ll be an extensive effort to cast the cuts in the most egregious manner possible. Whether even that won’t provoke the majority of the public to give a damn is an open question.
Thanks, and good analysis PJ-Comix.
“The average American has no idea what Sequestration is about.”
You are absolutely right. That is why I have been begging for republican lawmakers to carry an iPad with them everywhere they go; so that when an alphabet-bamacommie-camera (ABC) is shoved in their face, they can show a clip of Obama’s sequestration plan.
LIV’s know that all republicans are liars and racists, but an iPad never lies.
Oh Yeah,wait until tuesday Night when the Facist Pig goes into another one of his Rants and Harry Reid and the Press carries his water,then tell me how he is losing again
BTTT
Its already started. The news is reporting it as such.
But unlike the tax cut extension battle which the GOP had zero chance of what was defined as them winning, it will effect a limited number of people.
I live in MD and am hearing some whining, but the Feds are spending so such $$$ now its like a drop.
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