Woop, there it is

Victor Davis Hanson explains what the national madness of 2004-08 got us:

And so we got an inexperienced, hard-left, messianic president whose job apparently was to enjoy life, politick, play golf, hang out at Martha’s Vineyard, pick up prizes and awards, and turn the economy and foreign policy over to the Ivy League professoriate.

Ouch.

WSJ on the debt talks:

So the fondest Washington hopes for a grand debt-limit deal have broken down over taxes. House Speaker John Boehner said late Saturday that he couldn’t move ahead with a $4 trillion deal because President Obama was insisting on a $1 trillion tax increase, and the White House quickly denounced House Republicans for scuttling debt reduction and preventing “the very wealthiest and special interests from paying their fair share.”

The very wealthiest do pay their fair share. THE WEALTHIEST PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE. The “wealthiest” pay damn near all the taxes.

Unemployment is at 9.2%, and Obama wants to raise taxes by 1 TRILLION based on some nebulous promise of tax reform in the future. Sucker’s bet.

NRO’s KJL:

As a Hill source told Reuters’ James Pethokoukis earlier today: “WH is demanding major, unambiguous tax hikes. To get spending caps & entitlement tweaks, greater economic pain appears to be the WH’s asking price.”

It’s the spending, stupid. More NRO:

The constant media-Democratic drumbeat for a “balanced” package of spending cuts and tax increases ignores two important facts. The first is that Washington has repeatedly shown that legislation to increase spending is easier to enact than legislation to cut taxes — indeed, legislation is not even necessary to increase spending, because existing law allows it to grow automatically. So the ratio of spending cuts to tax increases in any deal is likely to deteriorate as time passes. The second is that taxes are already scheduled to increase, albeit not as much as spending is. The scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the incomplete indexation of the tax code to inflation, and the long-run effect of growth on tax brackets will all see to that. Both spending and taxes are on their way up, and the balance we need is spending cuts and tax cuts to counter that upward pressure on the budget.

I know all that is awfully complicated for our lefty friends to understand.

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