As I wrote yesterday, Democrats are obsessed with repealing the Bush tax cuts, especially the upper-end. They could use a 12-step program and a Higher Power.President Obama, after signing an extension of the Bush tax cuts last December, relapsed once again at his news conference today. It was the usual bashing of millionaires and billionaires, oil companies, corporate jets (made by Cessna and Hawker-Beechcraft), and investment funds.
Plus, the president says there’s only about $1 trillion of spending cuts over ten years. Pardon me for being cynical for thinking much of that is phony baloney.
So the whole debt-ceiling business is going nowhere. Republicans correctly reject tax hikes and the president isn’t yet digging in on spending. There’s no majority in the House for a $600 billion tax hike, and I hope there never is.
What we have now is certainly not a growth package to perk up the sputtering, less-than 2 percent economy, with its 9.1 percent unemployment rate. No mention at all of a real business-tax-reform overhaul.
On the plus side, the president did seem to side with Boeing in the NLRB dispute about adding jobs in South Carolina and the state of Washington. Obama said companies should be able to relocate anywhere in the United States.
But basically his message today was class-warfare, soak-the-rich. Somehow, Democrats are for your kids but Republicans are for your fat cats. It’s so tiresome. It will never sell.
Obama is in political trouble and he knows it.
