And by “in just a little over his head,” I of course mean “knows exactly what he’s doing.” But I didn’t want to come across in the headline as unhelpful. From The Hill:
President Obama’s 2013 budget would add $3.5 trillion to annual deficits through 2022, according to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
It also would raise the deficit next year by $365 billion, according to the nonpartisan office.
The CBO estimate is in sharp contrast to White House claims last month that the Obama budget would reduce deficits by $3.2 trillion over the next decade.?
[…]
In total, the Obama budget spends $3.7 trillion next year and proposes generating $1.5 trillion from new taxes over ten years.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who will release his own budget next week, emphasized that the CBO estimates the deficit next year will be $977 billion, $76 billion more than Obama had projected.
“It confirms the president will not fulfill his promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term — after four straight deficits in excess of $1 trillion, CBO estimates next year’s deficit will be even higher than the president claims,” Ryan said. “When it comes to our generation’s greatest challenges, the president refuses to take accountability or demonstrate much-needed leadership.”
Blah, blah, blah.
The fact is, none of this money is real, anyway. And one day it’ll all be gone, as every ideological “progressive” (as opposed to the useful idiots who merely enable it for a bit of cheap grace) already knows. In the meantime, may as well have what is real, now — namely, the power and influence that comes with doling out all this money in the time left before it becomes completely worthless, when economic reality finally overtakes every ruse put in place to protect perception. At which crisis point the left will swoop in once again, decry the failures of capitalism they helped bring about, and then work to reform the society in their own image. Whether the proles like it or not.
One of the big draws of being an academic reared on postmodern theoretics — and these are the people who taught Obama and who are now spread generously throughout his adminstration and throughout the bureaucratic apparatus that operates outside the purview of elections — is that you believe that the only things that are “real” or “true” are cynically created and determined and manipulated by man through language and power relations. You come to trust in your ability to turn everything into a matter of subjectivity. Perception, power, persuasion, and clan: these are all that matters.
We’ve proven cowards in the face of political correctness and an increasingly litigious and empowered legal industry / administrative state that exist to bully us and extract from us tribute and silence, and we’ve studiously accepted and institutionalized, as a people, every incoherent assumption about language and its functions — a fact that, as I’ve shown you over the past decade must necessarily and inexorably lead to a kind of totalitarianism camouflaged as populist democracy, given that it’s kernel assumptions provide a very real attack on individual autonomy and a very real preeminence to identity group narratives and consensus-based ideas of meaning and truth.
Unless and until we dramatically insist upon a classical liberal course change — and we have a blueprint in our very own Constitution, which is why the organized left works so tirelessly to diminish and marginalize it — we are on our way to an inevitable decline and, ultimately, the end of the American experiment as it was conceived.
Too many people don’t wish to hear such things — they’d rather get caught up in the horserace politics of getting their team a big win! — but it is what it is.
And I’m not going to forget that many who’ve pretended to be allies to liberty over the years are nothing of the sort — but rather are merely a flip side to the progressive coin, hoping for power and access and control, which they’ll decorate with a little flag label pin and some conservative bromides that they neither understand nor, in the end, believe.
(thansk to Johninfirestone)
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and these are the people who taught Obama and who are now spread generously throughout his adminstration and throughout the bureaucratic apparatus that operates outside the purview of elections
This is why our democracy is virtually unable to reform itself. Vote for anyone you like; it will have little effect on the growth of the administrative tyranny of the bureaucracy. Take two huge bureaucracies. EPA and DHS. (Thank you so very much, Nixon and Bush 43. Right back at ‘cha, ya big lugs.) Does anyone think a GOP Congress and President will do anything substantial to decimate these monstrosities? Does even SCOTUS seriously impede them? Have their influence and tentacled reach grown or shrunk over the years? They have never shrunk. Never.
Even Reagan couldn’t eliminate the Department of Education, and that verminous pile was a fraction of its current size back in his time.
Democracy is becoming a dumbshow. The administrative state is overweening, and that’s what people voted to achieve as ever more of human activity was deemed subject to state regulation, supervision and license. You want government looking over your shoulder at every turn, for the children, for the earth, for social justice? You want tyranny. With a smiley face. You cannot rid yourselves of it. Not by playing political pattycake.
Liberty was always an exception to the human condition. Perhaps we are just reverting to the mean.
“Liberty was always an exception to the human condition. Perhaps we are just reverting to the mean.”
Yes, well, perhaps. I still wonder whether the drivers of this trend fully understand what else comes along with it though (which, taking their pacifistic tendencies into account, augurs they do not).
Will the Republicans change things? Do they want to change things?
One observation though, whenever anyone laments the poor choices the Republicans are offering just remember that Joe Biden is the Vice President.
George you aren’t wrong with “Democracy is becoming a dumbshow” though becoming doesn’t fit exactly, since it always has been and therein lies the tale.
President Hayes just called to ask “When is Obama going to figure out how to use Google?”
President Hayes just called to ask “When is Obama going to figure out how to use Google?”
As soon as he figures out some other stuff like:
• The Selma March in 1965 did not contribute to his birth in 1961.
• Kansas tornadoes in May 2007 killed 12 people, not “ten thousand”.
• Afghans do not speak Arabic.
• Misunderstanding Memorial Day, and then claiming to see “fallen heroes” in the Memorial Day audience.
• Same day: putting Auschwitz in western Germany, not Poland.
• “57 states”.
And I’m not going to forget that many who’ve pretended to be allies to liberty over the years are nothing of the sort — but rather are merely a flip side to the progressive coin, hoping for power and access and control, which they’ll decorate with a little flag label pin and some conservative bromides that they neither understand nor, in the end, believe.
If nothing else, the last few months have made that point abundantly clear. Can’t say as I’ve enjoyed learning the lesson, but at least I have clarity.
That, and I’m on the hook for $137K as my share of the national debt.
“Yes, well, perhaps. I still wonder whether the drivers of this trend fully understand what else comes along with it though (which, taking their pacifistic tendencies into account, augurs they do not).”
I doubt it. Faith is as large a component in socialism as it is in religion.
“Faith is as large a component in socialism as it is in religion.”
Heh. Let’s don’t tell them Lee, and allow the socialists to think otherwise. It’s a handy dandy comparative advantage.
Atlas Shrugged is on Netflix. It delivers a most jarring sense of Ayn Rand’s remarkable prescience. My god but we are fucked.
No- we are corrupt.
Progressivism is a religion.
At which crisis point the left will swoop in once again, decry the failures of capitalism they helped bring about, and then work to reform the society in their own image. Whether the proles like it or not.
Some days, it seems the best a prole can hope for is a bastion of resistance, where fellow proles band together against the New Order. Fingers crossed that the Texans decide not to play along (and that they’ll be willing to accept refugees).
“..their pacifistic tendencies…”
I’d argue that they are not pacifists; they just are against what wars we support. Only their dupes are ‘pacifists’ (of a sort) but that will change when the time comes.
Their gulags and reeducation centers and wars have cost tens of millions.
In fact they are the most bloody-minded of us all; as we shall see.