Consider this story:
The president has signaled that at the start of the new year, he will speak more directly to the country about the financial choices ahead. “If we’re going to get serious about the deficit, then we’re going to have to look at everything: entitlements, defense spending, revenues. … And that’s going to be a tough conversation,” he said.
For some reason, I suspect that Obama’s vision of “everything” is going to be mostly about “revenues” (i.e., tax hikes), a little about “defense spending” (i.e., a smaller and less-capable military) and hardly at all about “entitlements” (i.e., the massive transfer programs that are blowing a hole in the budget.)
I believe that White House strategy for the next 2 years will be:
Having cranked up spending to obscene levels during our first two years, with the aid of Democratic congress, let’s try to crank taxation up to obscene levels during the next two years, with the connivance of a suckered and/or browbeaten Republican congress.
Don’t let ’em get away with it. We don’t have a deficit problem, we have a spending problem.
