As of this writing, the budget talks between Congress and the White House have collapsed. Thankfully, the Republicans stood their ground for a semi-sane solution to the impending deadline of August 2nd. This is the date that the Obama administration has deemed the point past which the oceans will stop receding, or something.
Oh wait, that’s when we’ll default on our massive debt obligations to our most favored trading nation, Communist China. But from what I can gather, this date is merely the one on which Obama can start his newest assault on House Republican for failing to approve his budget with $2T, yes, that’s a T, of tax increases.
We have plenty of revenue coming in to service these payments to our fine financial friends, but you’d never know it, especially if you relied on the Mainstream Media to keep you informed. Timmy “Turbo Tax” Geithner was interviewed on two MSM political talk shows yesterday, yet was never asked the one very simple question that might have calmed concerns in the markets: Do we have enough money coming in to pay our obligations? Click here to hear Geithner’s prefabricated, blame-the-Republicans interviews.
If that date passes without a budget, there will be repercussions, but if they are handled properly, this could force the bloated Obama administration to finally start living within its means, as the overwhelming majority of Americans want them to. We don’t want the debt ceiling raised, especially when there are cuts that can keep us under the present one.
Here’s the deal: we are constitutionally bound to pay these debts, as we should be. You may have seen this story on the Drudge Report where some Progressives, in a staggering reversal of their traditional ignorance of our Constitution, recently found within it an “obscure” provision that permits President Obama to sidestep Congress and proceed with his budget. Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which states that “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law . . . shall not be questioned,” is cited as their justification for usurping what has been for the past oh, 235 years or so, the sole power of Congress to control America’s purse strings.
As you may have guessed, that’s not exactly true. Or close to true. Or even in the same room with the truth. Or the same building. I could keep going, but you get the idea.
Only by the most tortured of definitions could this even be considered as an excuse by Obama to increase our already staggering debt. It’s that pesky “authorized by law” thingy. Only Congress can generate the law, since that’s where all laws originate according to the Constitution. See, that was easy.
Apparently, it’s so simple, that the Soros-funded, radical, far-left Obama think tank Center for American Progress can’t understand it. But then again, we’re dealing pretty much in plain English here, so their apparent confusion is to be expected.
But I’m digressing all over the place.
What this means is that our debt obligations will take priority over other expenditures. We’ll pay our good buddies, the ChiComs, first. After that money is spent, then the rest of Washington’s vast richness of departments, like the Department of Showing African Men How to Clean Their Genitals After Sex, might just be forced to get by with a little less money for a while.
If, and that’s a big if, House Republicans do it just right, they can start to reduce the drastic amount of spending that Obama said was only temporary. After all, that’s what we sent them there to do in the Great Shellacking of 2010. They have a clear mandate, one of the clearest in a generation. What this administration is doing with regard to the budget is bordering on can abuse.
They could claim that all these cuts were the direct result of Obama’s refusal to recognize fiscal reality, because they’d be right. They could just say that they’re helping Obama do what he said he’d do, namely cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.
Remember that?
They’d just be doing it in a slightly different way, the way you and I would do it with our household budgets, by cutting unnecessary spending. You know, the right way, with no smoke or mirrors and no class warfare.
Cut the EPA’s budget? Done. Ditto with the Departments of Energy, Education, Agriculture, and all the other departments that are duplicated by the states.
And here’s the biggie: Defense. I’m not really sure we should be cutting the Pentagon’s budget, what with Obama’s habit of engaging us in a new kinetic military action against regimes that don’t pose an imminent threat to us every six months or so.
Wouldn’t be prudent. If you want to cut defense, make damn sure it’s the waste that we’ve all heard so much about, not body armor for our troops.
Rick Santelli, the CNBC correspondent who is largely responsible for the current Tea Party movement, puts it best:
The answer is easy: spend less. . . .
Stop spending. Live within your means. I think what we need to do is live within the revenue intake, . . . end of story and do not ask taxpayers for more money or increase the debt ceiling until you give us a budget. . . .
There’s a right way and a wrong way to do just about everything, especially in Washington. We’re seeing the dismal results of doing it wrong for two and a half years now.
It’s time to start doing something right for a change.
Oh, and remember that chart I was going to create that showed the correlation between increased spending and the increase in unemployment? Someone beat me to it. It also shows the dropoff of the rate at the end of 99 weeks, just as it should.
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