And for that we should be appreciative — though, when we’re being honest, we need to note that he’s simply done what we wanted him to do, and it’s rather a perverse commentary on our politics that these days we breathe a sigh of relief when our elected representatives actually represent our wishes; too, it’s worth pointing out that simply by engaging in these “negotiations,” the GOP has given Obama a political narrative to use against them in the run-up to the 2012 election: instead of cutting entitlements like they claim they want to do, in the end the Republicans cared more about tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires who aren’t paying their fair share — a position it so happens is shared by a majority of Republicans, who just said as much when the Senate passed a Sense of the Senate resolution overwhelmingly.

Once again, the GOP establishment leadership was badly out-politicked — they should have avoided these “negotiations” by telling the President up front that they would not vote to raise the debt ceiling without spending cuts, most specifically, a cut to the “one-time” stimulus money-added baseline for spending Obama has appended to future budgets (resulting in a $9.6 trillion cut over 12 years) and a balanced budget amendment; instead, Boehner surrendered leverage by accepting the Democrat premise that failure to raise the debt ceiling would lead to immediate default and fiscal catastrophe, rather than simply forcing the government to make cuts while servicing the debt with the revenue already coming in — but, out-politicked though they were, at least they didn’t cave this time, at least, not in a huge way (I’ll wait to see what “revenue increases” they agree to by way of closing “tax expenditure loopholes,” essentially, by allowing the government to keep some of it’s money that you worked for that it might otherwise dispense back to you in the form of tax breaks).

Writes James Pethokoukis:

[…] maybe Boehner […] realized he was becoming a role player in an Obama-directed drama whose dramatic focus was securing a second-term for Obama. Either Obama got his big tax-hike deal and a) created a tea party revolt in the GOP, b) looked like a statesmen and c) partially deprived Republicans of a valuable line of attack in 2012 … or there was no deal, and Obama could hammer the GOP until Election Day for caring more about tax cuts for the rich than fiscal responsibility.

Boehner apparently will take his chances with door #2 and push for a roughly $2.4 trillion deal (with a debt ceiling hike, too) based on spending cuts already agreed to and some non-tax revenue raisers. Deeper spending cuts and structural entitlement reform would be better, but that is going to have to be a 2013 thing. Indeed, what entitlement reforms Obama was agreeing to were insufficient to Republicans.

Indeed, there were arms control agreements after Reykjavik, just as there will assuredly be more debt deals in the future. There must be or, as the Congressional Budget Office forecasts, debt as a share of GDP will explode from 70 percent today to as high as 250 percent by 2035 — assuming no economic implosion first. And no amount of tax increases will stop that. Some will push for just such options, of course. Liberal think tanks are devising plans to increase the total U.S. tax burden by at least 30 percent or more over the next two decades.

The other course is to reform entitlements and boost revenue by growing the economy faster. Boehner and the GOP, hopefully, took a step in that direction on Saturday and will take another one when they meet with Obama Sunday night.

Growing the economy, releasing the energy of a vibrant US private sector by lowering taxes and reining in regulatory agencies, and then working on real entitlement reforms like the Ryan Medicare plan — coupled with serious tax reform that insures more people have “skin in the game,” to borrow from Obama (a flat or fair tax will do), and a repeal of ObamaCare, which is another looming fiscal drain — is the only way to get the country back on track.

It takes a lot to build a strong country and strong economy. It takes a leftwing ideologue a mere two + years to threaten to bring down the whole already-weakened edifice.

Time to roll up our sleeves and start fixing this mess.

To do that, the GOP has to beat back the Obama message — they can start by refuting the class warfare arguments rather than voting in support of such Marxist nonsense — and let people know that raising taxes during a depression would have further harmed businesses and prevented them from hiring, leading to more layoffs and higher prices being passed on to consumers already struggling under conditions in the energy sector that has led to elevated food, gas, clothing, and electricity prices.

And of course, with the debt being what it is, and the Fed having been printing money to artificially prop up the stock market, the prospects for inflation are clearly on the horizon — and would only be exacerbated by an increase in taxes that matches this administration’s scandalous increase in onerous regulatory edicts.

Time to take the country back. We don’t have time to be playing class warfare games with Marxists. As I mentioned in a comment yesterday, I can almost forgive the idiots who voted for Obama in 2008, those who bought into his “pragmatism” and “post-partisan” Hope and Change pitch, who weren’t sufficiently dialed in to politics enough to identify the clear tells he’d let slip that he was in fact a Marxist ideologue.

In 2012, though, it’s a different story: anyone working to get this guy re-elected is an enemy to individual liberty, constitutional government, and the very free-market capitalist system that turned the US into the strongest, most prosperous nation in world history — and as such, I will view them as trying to enslave me and my family to them and the state.

And I don’t wear shackles well.