What planet is President Barack Obama living on anyway?
Yesterday the previously press conference-averse president had his third news conference in two weeks to once again make his pitch for a “big package” to close the federal deficit, to which he has already managed to add $4 trillion.
His solution remains what it has always been — taxes. But then you knew that. Or did you?
“You have 80 percent of the American people who support a balanced approach,” Obama said yesterday. “Eighty percent of the American people support an approach that includes revenues and includes cuts. So the notion that somehow the American people aren’t sold is not the problem. The problem is members of Congress are dug in ideologically.”
Wow, wouldn’t you love to know where that opinion sampling came from?
Isn’t that what we’re all hearing on the street, that really what we all need is for government to tax us more?
But if that wasn’t working for you, Obama offered Plan B — the notion that should there actually be a government default because the debt ceiling has not been raised then that would be “effectively a tax increase for everybody” as interest rates rise.
Well, true, but plans are proceeding apace for a real Plan B that would allow incremental increases in the debt ceiling absent a grand bargain.
But wait, as they say in those infomercials, there’s more.
Yes, the president would surely not call a news conference and not bring out — again — the doomsday rhetoric. He just can’t seem to help himself these days, although this was at least in the context of some faint praise for the so-called McConnell plan.
“It is constructive to say that if Washington operates as usual and can’t get something done let’s at least avert Armageddon,” the president said.
Another day, another Armageddon reference.
Perhaps it’s time the president reread that fable about the boy who cried “wolf” too often. |