Key Excerpt:
Fiscal conservatives who bought the spiel that he’d go
line by line through the budget have seen the most fiscally irresponsible
president ever. After a $787B pork-filled stimulus, a supplemental spending
measure with 9,000 earmarks, a $3.5 trillion budget, and a trillion dollar
health care plan, Obama has managed to exceed the worst predictions of his
critics. And now at least some of his advisors are letting on that his promise not to hike taxes on 95% of taxpayers is going to be cast aside. After all, the deficit is now so huge
we must plug the gap, right? (Robert Gibbs said Obama would never raise taxes on the middle class – well, except for those cigarette and energy
taxes.)
Then there are the good government types who fancied a new era of
transparency and lobbyist-free government. Well, not quite. We have had the long
list of tax cheats and the lobbyists who needed ethics waivers
to squeeze through the revolving door. Again and again — whether on the stimulus
plan or on cap and trade — gargantuan legislation has been rushed through
without public scrutiny. Well, if the public figured out what was on some of
those thousands of pages, they might have objected.
Do I feel let down by this? Yes. Has some of it been an extraordinary response to extraordinary times? Yes. But has all of it? Absolutely not. The administration needs to step back from the fiscal precipice.
No comments:
Post a Comment