Everything Old Is Well, Still Old

We heard yesterday that the White House will unveil a new plan for fiscal responsibility this week. Well, I’m glad that the White House is jumping on the bandwagon, but the ink isn’t dry on their last pathetic budget plan. Nothing says “leadership” like jumping all over the place on issues.

And we already know what’s going to be in it. They’re going to time warp back to last summer, which means killing the Bush tax cuts, major cuts to defense, and they’ll punt on entitlements and tell Congress to do something about them.

I’m pretty sure we already had this election, but apparently President Barack Obama (D-USA) thinks he gets a mulligan. Maybe the only thing that says “leadership” like jumping all over the place is jumping back a year to arguments that were miserable failures then. The fashion world has a statement that “everything old is new again”, but that doesn’t apply here. In this case, old is well, still old.

Expect to hear, once again, all summer long about how awful the Bush tax cuts are. We’ll also hear that if not for the evil Republicans who are being held hostage to the even more evil Tea Party not allowing him to expire them, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Remember this graph?

Removing that tax cut on the $250,000 and up crowd will only get the feds back an additional $700B. And that’s over ten years. When you’re running trillion dollar deficits annually, that’s a drop in the bucket. It’s not that much bigger a drop than the one we got this weekend which works out to be over $400B over ten years.

If we get rid of all of the Bush tax cuts, we get to $3T over ten years. A much more impressive number, but that assumes that we don’t kill the economy in the process, so you can write down “unrealistic” next to that number.

Expect no one on the Democrat side to mention ObamaCare at all, and to attempt very hard to deflect the subject when asked about it.

And certainly don’t expect any Democrat to even discuss the fact that we had all these discussions already, and that the American public made their opinion on them quite clear.