Compounding the bad policy of the fiscal cliff deal is Obama’s braggadocio comment that when the next debt ceiling negotiations come up, probably next month, he won’t budge.
“I will negotiate over many things,” he told a press conference on New Year’s Day. “I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills they have already racked up through the laws they have passed.”
What Obama didn’t say, of course, is that he inherited a debt of $10 trillion, and through his own policies increased the debt by 60% in less than four years. How? By getting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to block any budget since the first (and only) Obama budget, passed in 2009, which expanded the size of government by more than 20%.
The real solution would have been to cut federal spending. That would have been the rational thing to do. When you are spending beyond your means and your second job still doesn’t help you to make ends meet, you reduce your spending.
But politics isn’t about doing what’s best for the country. It’s about doing what’s best for politicians, which is to play class warfare and build a permanent entitled class that will vastly outnumber those who produce wealth and will simply take more from the wealth-producers in order to finance their lives.
I salute the 151 Republicans who voted no on this bad bill. Some of them will undoubtedly be made to pay a political price for their votes. We need more men and women in Congress like them who are willing to point to the emperor and cry out that he stands naked.
Ken Timmerman was the Republican nominee for Congress in 2012 for Maryland’s 8th District.
