Moe Lane

Personally, I’m not entirely certain why the Obama administration is so adamant about raising taxes on small businesses, but they’ve at least abandoned their previous position where a possible early end to Bush-era tax breaks (now scheduled to expire in 2012) was on the debt ceiling negotiating table.  Unfortunately, the White House is still adamantly refusing to accept the pesky objective reality that there are no Magical Revenue Generators that will allow the country to boost the tax-to-GDP revenue ratio to 25%, forever.  In other words, the Democrats don’t want to even think about making spending cuts, and they’re reacting to exasperated Republican calls for them in precisely the same way that pigs react when you don’t refill the trough with swill.

I know that people out there get exasperated with the GOP some times, but if there’s been a better contrast in recent memory between Bad and Worse* than in the comparison of this Congress to the last one, I can’t think of it offhand.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*More like Not Perfect and Hideously Awful, in my personal opinion – but I sometimes have to factor in a certain institutional pessimism when I write stuff for the VRWC.

Which is a surprise, given that I didn’t think that there were 318 Republicans in the House… no, wait, there aren’t. 82 Democrats voted against raising the debt limit without accompanying spending cuts; which is highly entertaining, given that 114 House Democrats signed Rep. Peter Welch’s letter requesting… precisely this vote. Do compare the signatories to said letter with the no votes on HR 1954: you will notice an entertaining amount of overlap, there.

The hysterical bit? The Democrats are complaining that they didn’t get to add amendments to the bill, which is fairly straightforward: (more…)

I think that Daniel Foster over at NRO has a good point, here: a credible threat along those lines is going to force the Democrats to make a lot of concessions.  I also think that the tenor of his comments section suggest that ‘credible threat’ is the compromise solution: there is a definite movement out there that embraces a point-blank opposition*.  So, Democrats: you can deal with Senator Lindsey Graham; or you can deal with the people who think that Senator Graham is too squishy for words.

Which do you prefer?

Moe Lane (more…)