Only in America are the ones who want to balance the budget and make raising the national debt limit unnecessary labeled “terrorists,” while those who want to raise the national credit card limit to infinity deemed reasonable. That’s the lesson of the October partial government shutdown and debt limit debate that the media have tried to teach us.
Count this “terrorist” among the learning-disabled on this lesson.
I say it’s all about the selling job. The media and most politicians trumpeted only one option as a metaphysical necessity throughout the debate: We must raise the debt ceiling. Nobody ever discussed the alternative, balancing the budget, which would have made raising the debt ceiling unnecessary.
Of course, as a “terrorist,” I could be wrong. The federal budget was balanced during the shutdown, as federal spending was cut by more than what the CBO projected annual deficit to be. And those spending cuts strangely didn’t move Obama’s debt limit deadline by even a single minute. Only a terrorist such as I would imply Obama cooked the books to hype that deadline.
But this is America. And in America we can rely on the fact that the terrorists always lose, just as reliably as Republican leaders always cave to the demands of Democrats. So, the debt limit will officially be infinity until February 7. We terrorists — the constitutionalist movement, Tea Party conservatives, and the Congressional Liberty Caucus — certainly lost. The only thing worse to a terrorist than not coming to a national debt limit deal is coming to a “clean” debt deal that simply enables more debt and a bigger reckoning later.
But America never loses. The White House trumpeted back on July 8, “The 2013 deficit is now projected to be 4.7 percent of GDP. That is down from a deficit of 10.1 percent four years ago — representing the fastest period of deficit reduction since the years immediately following World War II.” Forget the diminished expectations. We should be jumping out of our pants for joy because the federal government is only driving toward the debt cliff at 60 miles per hour, instead of the 120-mph pace at which we were driving four years ago. Obama claimed his “budget achieves a core goal of fiscal sustainability by putting Federal debt on a declining path as a share of the economy.” As Charlie Sheen would say, “Winning!”
Terrorists might say Obama is correct, if by “sustainable” he means “not sustainable.” Current projections are that deficits will come down to about $560 billion annually in a couple of years, and then quickly rise back to double the GDP-growth ratio considered “stable.” But that’s assuming some unrealistically optimistic events occurring: no double-dip recession and 3.5 percent inflation-adjusted GDP growth in 2015 and 2016, and (most importantly) interest rates remaining at zero with continued low cost of federal borrowing. We absolutely can’t have all three, and we’ll probably have none, except, perhaps, suppressed interest rates, courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank.
The shutdown was largely a result of a fight over ObamaCare. Terrorists also say that ObamaCare “won’t work,” and that the whole program will crash as quickly as the HealthCare.gov website. Of course, Obama and the media “super-patriots” sell terrorists on the idea that failure won’t stop the program from continuing. “When,” the media super-patriots will essentially tell us terrorists, “has the fact that it doesn’t work ever stopped a government program?”
And I guess I part company with my fellow terrorists — and agree with Obama and his media minions — on this point. I live in Massachusetts, where they’ve had ObamaCare since Mitt Romney first created it in 2007. ObamaCare is just Romneycare 2.0. Romneycare doesn’t work in Massachusetts, and yet it goes on. We Bay-staters just pay the highest healthcare premiums in the nation.
ObamaCare, like Romneycare before it, is about the selling job and not about whether it works. And the selling job for ObamaCare continues apace, with the Obama administration hiring the Superbowl champion Baltimore Ravens to promote the program with $130,000 taxpayer dollars.
Why the Ravens? Because if there’s one thing that millionaires with a Cadillac healthcare plan can do with credibility, it’s sell the working poor and self-employed on the idea that they should pay more for health insurance so that other people can get subsidized healthcare. Don’t laugh. It just might succeed in selling Joe Sixpack.
Of course, if I’m going to be in the same category as the people who shot our Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi, the Syrian heart-eating rebels, and the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel shooters of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, I need just one more thing for authenticity. So, please, President Obama, will you send me a fully automatic weapon, too?
