I’m still sifting through the various somersaults the Obama Administration is spinning to cut the budget. I’ll have more to say about that, and the budget fight, over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, two thoughts:
1. All this would be an awful lot easier if we just…raised taxes. Not much. Just back to the Clinton levels for the wealthiest Americans, and perhaps completely lifting the cap on social security taxes, which would go a long way toward solving that problem. (As a matter of fairness, we could lower the retirement age for people in the lower income brackets and raise it for those in the higher brackets–but that’s another story.)
2. In the end, I think Obama has a strong hand here. People really don’t want the social safety net cut. They don’t mind raising taxes on the wealthy, or cutting the pentagon budget (which could certainly use a significant post-cold war trim). If the Republicans want to inflict pain, let them try. Let them shut down the government while we’re at war. Let them close the national parks during spring vacation. Republican deficit-reduction fetishism is a sometime thing; it only happens when Democrats are President. Most people outside of DC–and the guilty precincts of Wall Street where speculators, having hollowed out the American economy, cling to the “high-minded” notion of deficit cutting as a way to pretend they’re righteous–don’t care all that much about the deficit. They probably should, but they don’t. Obama shouldn’t forget that.
And on another note: As Kate Pickert reports below, Andrew Breitbart got served at CPAC. Unfortunately, I didn’t witness this stellar moment…but I did watch, in horror, as Breitbart inflicted himself on the audience for a half hour in a decidedly juvenile and incoherent manner. He claimed Attention Deficit Disorder as an excuse for his incoherence, but I think this is wrong: the boy clearly has no addition deficit when it comes to himself. A more precise diagnosis would be terminal narcissism. What a creep.