Democrats ‘Apparently Ready to Shoot the Hostage’
Democrats held firm today to their demand of a rapid middle-class tax cut extension, posturing on deficit reduction and trying to twist Republican arms as $492 billion in defense cuts loom on the horizon.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), one of the members of the super committee that failed to reach a deficit-reduction consensus last November, thus triggering the sequestration, said the Democrats’ game is worse than Russian roulette.
“Russian roulette implies that you’ve got five chances out of six that you won’t kill yourself. Phil Gramm used to have a saying around here: ‘Never take a hostage you’re not willing to shoot,’” Kyl told reporters while flanked by other Senate GOP leaders today. “But the Democrats, apparently, are willing to take hostage the American economy, our defense preparedness, and literally the lives of families and businesses in this country just in order to raise taxes on 940,000 businesses in this country. They are apparently ready to shoot the hostage.”
Republicans have protested that President Obama is ignoring the potentially catastrophic cuts — reductions that would lead to the smallest ground force since 1940, a fleet of fewer than 230 ships (the smallest since 1915), and the smallest tactical-fighter force in the history of the Air Force, according to the House Armed Services Committee.
But the message of Democrats, almost giddy over their bargaining chip, is clear: If you want some semblance of a strong national defense, tax the wealthy.
While Obama was on the campaign trail in the Lone Star State today, former Vice President Dick Cheney was on Capitol Hill to counsel Republicans on how to avoid sequestration.
A former secretary of Defense, Cheney reportedly warned House and Senate lawmakers that defense money needs to flow in “predictable ways” or else the U.S. would be left vulnerable in the face of encroaching threats such as Iran.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) knocked Cheney’s visit as a plug for his old defense contractor days.
“Halliburton did extremely well during his time as vice president, and I assume there’s going to be some concern about Halliburton again in this conversation they’re going have today,” Reid quipped to reporters following a policy luncheon.
He also chastised reporters for concentrating on the defense end of automatic cuts triggered by the failure of the super committee.
“You always fail to mention that there’s big cuts there for domestic programs, also. So what we’ve said with that legislation — it’s going to be hard, but we need to find $1.2 trillion to relieve the country from the burden of this debt. And this will be a long — a big step in that direction,” Reid said.
As Reid urged that “the 2 percent should pay a little more,” though, Kyl countered that the tax increase would hurt beyond defense.
Kyl cited a May report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that predicted the economy will contract at a rate of 1.3 percent annual rate for the first six months of 2013 — a “mild recession” with just one half of one percent GDP growth. “Now, we’re hurting today at just under 2 percent,” he said.
“In contrast, if we don’t allow this big tax increase, if we continue the current tax policies that we’ve had for the last decade, CBO projects that the economy will grow by 4.4 percent,” Kyl continued. “Think about the difference. Republicans in effect are saying let’s have 4.4 percent growth, Democrats are saying we’ll be satisfied with the recession and one half of 1 percent.”
“The CBO estimated earlier this year that under the Democrat proposal, joblessness will rise from its current 8.2 percent to 9.2 percent,” he added. “All of this plus incredible damage to U.S. defense, just so they can say they increased taxes on 940,000 businesses.”
Obama has urged Congress to pass the middle-class tax cuts immediately, then come back to the rest of the tax-cut extensions — which expire at the end of the year — another time. He has made clear, though, that he won’t support tax-cut extensions for the upper-income brackets, making even Democrats who had supported more generous income ceilings abandon their earlier compromise efforts and come to Obama’s side.
The debate kicked off the week at a fever pitch after Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), co-chair of the super committee, said “something is going to have to change” if Congress wants to avoid “the so-called fiscal cliff.”
“Thankfully, I’m seeing some encouraging signs from Republicans who are sick and tired of being boxed in by the most extreme elements of their base — who don’t like being responsible for continued manufactured crises that hurt the economy and destroy our nation’s faith in its government — and who are concerned about the impact of sequestration,” Murray said.
“In the privacy of back rooms and in small gangs, Republicans are far more willing to discuss the need for revenue. And there are some Republicans passionate about national defense and willing to make some tough choices on revenue to protect the Pentagon.”
And Murray said definitively, “We are also not going to allow just the defense cuts to be replaced without addressing the domestic spending cuts that would be devastating to the middle class. ”
Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), also a member of the super committee, defended the GOP’s role on the deadlocked panel after Murray laid out what she saw as a multitude of Republican sins that led to negotiations falling flat.
Despite offering a framework that included lowering all income tax rates offset by reducing the value of deductions, a plan his colleagues “were generally willing to support,” Toomey said “unfortunately, we could progress no further because the Democrats were unwilling to retreat from their trillion-dollar tax-hike demands.”
Republican leaders wrote Obama on Friday to urge his cooperation in helping avert disastrous defense cuts, protesting an administration-proposed six-month postponement of the sequester that would knock its implementation clean past Inauguration Day but “would actually exacerbate the cut’s impact since agencies would be forced to absorb the same cut in the three remaining months of the fiscal year rather than over nine months.”
“Even though the Administration has yet to put forward a plan to address this issue, the House of Representatives took responsible action in May by passing legislation that would replace the 2013 sequester with other common-sense spending reductions and reforms,” wrote House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), and Senate Minority Whip Kyl.
“A group of Senate Republicans has introduced a bill to replace the 2013 sequester with savings attributed to extending the current federal pay freeze for 18 months and reducing the federal workforce through attrition. Your Administration has not commented on the Senate bill and issued a statement saying that your senior advisors would recommend that you veto the House proposal, citing in part your desire for economically damaging tax increases.”
The House is expected to consider this week the Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012, sponsored by the Republican co-chair of the super committee, Republican Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas). It would require Obama to detail within 30 days of passage how he plans to handle the deep cuts.
Defense Department spokesman George Little was asked at today’s briefing if the Pentagon was able to plan for the sequester of FY 2013 funds.
“It’s a very fair question. We are, obviously, assessing the potential impacts of sequestration,” Little said. “But, clearly, we do need to take a look at contracts and take that into account, should sequestration go into effect.”
A new report issued today, commissioned by the Aerospace Industries Association, warned that the sequestration could whack more than 2 million jobs and add 1.5 percent to the unemployment rate, along with stripping $215 billion from the nation’s GDP.
“The results are bleak but clear-cut,” said Stephen S. Fuller of George Mason University, who conducted the study. This would include the loss of 325,693 Defense Department jobs, including 48,147 civilian DoD employees, 282,426 jobs lost at defense contractors, and 482,240 jobs lost that are dependent on payroll spending of the laid-off defense workers.
“Democratic leaders like our colleague from Washington state are apparently ready to stand by and allow truly draconian across-the-board defense cuts, even though the president’s own secretary of Defense has said these cuts would ‘hollow out’ our military and be ‘catastrophic’ to our national security,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said on the Senate floor yesterday.
“It simply amazes and discourages me that some people are willing to play chicken with our economy and our national security in such a cavalier, calculated sort of way.”
The Democrats are terrorists. Never negotiate with terrorists.
Rather than capitulate to the terrorists’ demands, the Republicans should be implementing a coordinated attack strategy showing what reckless fools these terrorists are. The fact that they are demanding more money when they have not passed a budget in three years and counting is a good place to start.
It is akin to financial terror when ‘spreading the wealth around’ hijackers keep picking the pockets of the select few who fuel the economy.
Nevertheless, Americans have other terrorists ready to pounce, AND pounce they will.
I STRONGLY suggest PJM readers to read the following update at my blog, talk about scary….
http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/07/17/update-middle-east-on-fire-nearing-full-fledged-explosion-addendum-tothe-mother-of-all-wars-is-knocking-at-our-door-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki-76-2/.
I have long contended, that without a strong USA the rest of the west will (eventually) cease to exist, except as a shell of itself. Now, isn’t it ironic that the den of Democratic thieves are using the Pentagon as a bully stick, when all the while the citizens don’t know what will hit them.
Instead of reverting true to form it would behoove Congressional leadership to inform the citizens about Hizbullah operatives who are getting ready to pounce.
Bastard leadership, the whole damn lot!
A little known Islamic terror tool – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/07/18/jihad-via-arson-as-fires-rage-provensuspicious-too-here-in-israel-there-in-the-us-a-fatwa-on-their-heads-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki-23/ – is jihad by arson.
Westerners would do well to catch up to speed, lest there will be little left to save- economic or otherwise !
Actually the last budget passed was a Repubican Budget for 2007, since then it has been floating into oblivion.
The Repubs need to grow a backbone and tell the Socialists to ‘pack sand, there will be no deals except to hold the Bush tax cuts in place or nothing’.
We, the Patriot Citizens of this nation, know who the terrorists are and we will stand with the Constitutional Conservatives and vote in more in November. The days of Liberals and Communists are over, we are going to take back this country – one way or the other, so pick your side because it is going to get ugly shortly….
Excellent post! There are two ways to pay for defense: tax and demotivate the job creators or cut the wasteful programs (Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, free health care, VA benefits, ag subsidies, etc.) for the free loaders, the takers in our society. It is really very simple. Nothing is more important than our security and maintaining our position as the world’s indispensable military power. Thanks for laying out the contrast clearly Ms. Johnson.
It’s not as though there aren’t plenty of unconstitutional federal government activities to cut:
ObummerDoesn’tCare
Medicare
Medicaid
Socialist Insecurity Abomination
most of HHS
most of Dept. of Energy
most of Dept. of Educationism
most of EPA
at least a third of BATFE
UN, World Bank, IMF, WTO
half of Dept. of Interior
National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts, CPB, NPR
and as long as DHS is actively avoiding doing their job there’s room for some cuts there
but the most unconstitutional of their activities are the very ones the idols the leftists consider sacred.
Just get out of Afcrapistan. That would save a lot of money and lives and limbs.
BTW, twice as many American troops have died in Afcrapistan under Obama as did under Bush even though it’s now been only half the time under LBJ Obama.
Yes, at 1/20th the press coverage. It’s almost as if the media were nothing but partisan assweasels with not principles at all…
So you are willing to give the radicals within Islam a place to train? Would you be willing to give the militia movement here in the US a national park in which to train as well?
Why not turn all military over to the states to include the nuclear weapons? And let us have private military companies (professional militia). Get government out of the war and let the private citizen do the job. I would be willing to fight for money and go kill radical Muslims worldwide.
so, you think Afghainstan is merely a training ground for jihadis? There are billions of square miles available to them elsewhere. Besides, it is not OUR business to determine how the locala use their forsaken dirt in Afpakistan. They will train wherever they can, and there is no end of places. I remember the panic cries when toe Soviets held sway in Nicaragua.. we were funding the contras, illegally, to resist, but the economics of waging a war in a useless country halfway round the planet from the USSR is what dealt the deathblow to the first Sandinista regime, eventualy leading to the democratic election of a great president. We “had to kill them there to they’d not come here”. Nonsense.
What we NEED to do is pull out of our self-assumed role as the planet’s police force and take care of things here at home… including getting our economy running again, which will NOT happen when those who have the means and desire to produce goods HERE are taxed into oblivion, forcing them offchore, or to abandon their market niches to the chinese. Sick of the chinese garbage at Home Depot, Costco, WalMart, NAPA? Stop taxing and regulating the producers here at home so they can actually turn a profit… tax revenue will increase, as more will be working, have money to spend, we’ll be keeping business at home, won’t be “increasing our carbon footprint” (what a sick joke THAT lie is) to ship billionis of tons of good half way round the world… our military can then be deployed here at home, safe and with their families, and SEAL our border with Mexico, ending the drug war and flood of illegal immigration… and hopefull, the flow of government bought arms to fuel the cartels’ wars on their own people.
2016 Obama’s America
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfLsSg9wZlE&feature=player_embedded
How many bets, after he manages to tank the armed forces, he then tries to goose his public opinion ratings with some adventurism.
“It simply amazes and discourages me that some people are willing to play chicken with our economy and our national security in such a cavalier, calculated sort of way.”
That sums it all up neatly.
OBAMA IS OUT TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY….WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE TO GET HIM OUT NOW…HE HAS THE MONEY FOR ILLEGALS, WHAT IS THAT PRICE 3,4, BILLION A YR., THEY ARE THE PROBLEM? BEFORE YOU KNOW, MEXICO WILL BE EMPTY?
This is very good news. Apparently, the criminals have become so confident that they have 51%+ of Americans on the dole that they can drop all pretense of fiscal sanity. No doubt having the weakling Romney running against them is a big part of it as well.
The bad news is that they may be right. But you know, as far as Romney goes, sometimes the weakling isn’t as weak as he seems. When the rumble starts for real, maybe he can come alive. I’m not betting the farm on it, but it could happen.
The good news is that that battle needs to be fought TODAY, with a communist running for president and mental retards filling Congress, even with Romney on the point. Battles aren’t won by generals alone.
There will never be a better time. It will only get worse if the final battle is delayed. Get it all on the table. Get it all out in public. Do it now.
A las barricades.
Speaking of coming alive, listen to Romney’s remarks today in response to President You Didn’t Do That’s weekend slander of American workers and entrepreduers.
Finally, something got Mitt a little agitated. No plastic grin, no robotic gestures, retatively impassioned language…and to beat all of that, he actually defended PEOPLE, the people who make the country work…while at the same time criticizing Predident You Didn’t Do That in a fairly robust way.
At one point he even made a boxers gesture where he wipes his nose like a boxer would with his glove. It’s unmistakeable.
More please.
And we would be giving in to blackmail why? If the Democrats are hell-bent on destroying our military just to raise taxes so our government can waste even more money, I’d like to see them explain that to the American public, especially in an election year.
Why are we afraid of this? In any case, if the Republicans win Congress in November they can repeal all of these laws and vote in more money for the military. And if the Democrats hold on to the Senate, they’ll have to explain to the American public why destroying the Pentagon is a good idea. I’d like to see them try and do that, even with the mainstream media supporting them. And with all the jobs that are going to be lost if they cut the Pentagon budget, I’d like to also see the Democrats explain to those people why they are not to blame for losing their jobs.
Call their bluff. They do not have a leg to stand on and they know it. They are only screaming loudly because they know they can’t win.
So what do you think 0 is planning on doing? He probably thinks he can get away with going to war with Iran/Syria in the early fall, force the Republicans to raise taxes to pay for it, and then loose the war and slash the military. You can already see the chess pieces being moved on the board: another carrier battle group to the Middle East; new X-ray radar and anti-missile system being installed in Qatar; rumors of WMD in Syria; meeting with the new quasi-President of Egypt next week; and, so on and so forth. If he can actually get the Congress to declare war he can probably try to scrap the Constitution as we know it. Axelrod/Emmanuel would be all in on that project. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Think Hitler circa 1936.
A few things come to mind: Surely we can figure out a way to cut $100 billion from defense without compromising our preparedness. There is waste in the DOD just as there is waste in the rest of the government, and we can strip out waste if only we take waste seriously. Second, let them raise taxes, for taxes can be cut retroactively by the new Congress, so we just have to win. Third, when you encounter a bluff, raise. Refuse to increase the debt ceiling, and force them to balance the budget.
Agreed–defense is no sacred cow. It is a necessary function of govt, and should be strong. But all government run programs will accumulate waste. They’ll also hold onto old tech for far too long.
I am curious, honestly: since say, Vietnam, what is the largest number of naval vessels we’ve deployed?
We can probably reduce our fleet of massive bombers, too. Obviously we are in an age where mass ww2 style bombing will never again happen. We will target precise targets from how on, and probably never intentionally bomb cities and civilians again unless via Nuke as a last resort.
Troops do seem necessary, but there have to be tons of places the military can cut without whining, and still be a lean and mean fighting machine,
They’re already well in the process of slashing the military to the bone. When we have pilots flying the same F-15s that their grandfathers flew because there’s no money in the budget to replace those aircraft, we’ve got serious problems. They’re running out of superfluous programs to cut and sooner or later, it’s going to start negatively affecting our security posture internationally.
Perhaps the one area where meaningful savings could be had, though, are pensions/benefits, which are estimated to be climbing as high as 1/7th of the military’s overall budget. Currently, if one serves twenty years in the military, one is eligible for retirement benefits IMMEDIATELY upon leaving the service. So if you enlist at seventeen, you can get out at thirty-seven, go into a second career, and still collect a retirement check from the DoD for the rest of your life (yes, even if you’re working in another job). Depending on what rank you’re at when you exit, this is a considerable amount of money per month. They’ve made some efforts to reform this system, but from what I understand, it’s been largely ineffective so far. I would assume that $100 billion could be trimmed from that program, though, should somebody be able to actually enact change in it.
I also agree; it should be a piece of cake to cut $100 billion, and probably more. Get out of AfPak, end the undeclared (and therefore, illegal) drone wars in Yemen and Somolia, cut 3 or 4 carrier battle groups (do we REALLY need ELEVEN when no other country has more than ONE?!?), close all but one or two bases in Europe, and make our European allies pick up more of the tab for their own defense. A leaner, meaner military would also discourage the present and future occupants of the White House from engaging in wild, reckless, foolhardy military adventures in places that we have no business being.
what was that I was reading just a few days ago, something about the Air Force haveing a programme to supply bioguels for their needs, at a projected cost of somewhere around FIFTY SIX DOLLARS A GALLON, more than ten times what I’ve been paying at the public, heavily taxed, pumps for my own diesel? One channel of waste, likely forced upon them by the EPA or some other green-sick fool. If that one has come to light, how many other places are there like that? Use the same damn diesel and Jet A everyone else uses, stupid…….. I remember the huge kafuffle a couple of decades back where the DoD were buying Stanley framing hammers at something like $270 the copy… when the identical hammer was available at the local high priced lumber yard for about twelve bucks……
I’d like to create a new office at the federal level, and fill it myself…. a “waste warrior” that has the liberty go go about in our military and find insane waste like this…. and for every dollar I can find that is wasted, and end the waste with NO CHANGE in function, I get one cent as my salary.
Let’s see, how many milions of gallons of Jet A, at fifty six per, can I replace with the same stuff they pupp at SeaTac Airlport at somewhere around three dollars the gallon… fifty three dollars times a billion gallons divided by a hundred…… I could live on that, comfortably, and sleep well at night knowing I’ve saved fifty two dollars ninety nine times a million for our economy.
Stupid feds….. when will this corruptioin end?
Follow the money! I wouldn’t be surprised that this deal involves an Obama supporter, bundler & another Green job scam!
**And there are some Republicans passionate about national defense**
For example those whose re-election funding is controlled by the defense industry?
Note to self: Buy more ammo!
Jim Whittaker
Hemet, CA
you jusst migiht be needing it, even way out there in Hemet……. sort of near the end of anywhere important.
The fact that they are demanding more money when they have not passed a budget in three years and counting is a good place to start.
Right. The Obama administration will keep writing checks, the folks (government employees, contractors, and other assorted hangers on) will continue to deposit them, and the banks continue to honor them. Budget or no budget. Congress cannot stop them from doing this because Democrats in power do whatever they please anyway, and all the people handling the government checks are in on the game. The government wants to spend the money, the recepients want to get it, and the banks want to keep the regulators away.
What Congressional Republicans can do is force tax cuts. If tax cuts happen, then citizens won’t write checks to the IRS and the Obama admin won’t be able to cash checks it never gets. It can try to force people to pay taxes that don’t exist, but that’s a lot harder than just writing checks you’re not supposed to write. Taxes require the cooperation of outside entities that are not in on the game.
It seems to me that the O gang figure they’ve got it covered no matter what happens. If the GOP gives in and goes with his tax deal, he’s the hero of the struggling middle class; if they don’t, the fiscal cliff dive is their fault.
If the GOP makes a deal to save the defense budget, Obama gets credit for it and the extra social spending that’ll be part of the deal; if they don’t, they caused the loss of social spending “investment” AND the military weakness. If the big O wins the election, we continue as we are, with a Congress without the power to stop his extra-legislative legislating; if he loses, he’s still a hero to the left, and Romney and the GOP are set up to be another Hoover administration, with a re-invigoration of the left and Dems in ’16 and for a generation.
Sounds like a plan, but no plan survives contact with the enemy and reality is always an enemy of utopians. Not to mention, in this case, the Tea Partiers.
If the current GOP troops in Congress play it tough, and right-whatever that is; if people see what’s going on-if they’re allowed to….if they pay attention…
Going to get interesting.
Of course they are ready to “shoot the hostage”. After all the military and the free economy are two things they not only don’t care about but actively hate.
There is no strong Pentagon as long as the goons are in power. In any case, what does a “strong” Pentagon do? Invade Iran? How about Syria, and Afghanistan? Help the Muslim Brotherhood in Eygpt? Nuke Israel? What the hell is the point to have a “strong” Pentagon under a weak Commander-in-chief? So Republicans should wait for Romney instead of raising taxes and losing votes from their base.
Remember the line about “a civilian force as well funded as the military”? Simple, increase and arm IRS and EPA agents, cut the military and voilla! Instant totalitarinism.
Al, this is an absolutley firghtening scenario… and I really hate to say it, but I ahve this horrid feeling you are smack in the middle of the ten-ring. I sincerely hope you are wrong, but I fear you are not.
WH are the IRS buying thousands of twelve-bore shotguns?
To Republicans in the House and Senate and challengers, if you’re going to play chicken, play to win. You’ve already passed a bill out of the House to extend the current tax rates. Lay this impasse at the feet of Harry Reid and the Democrats.
The Democrats in the Senate and House extended these tax rates after getting drubbed in the fall 2010 elections, while they still had a House majority, and a nearly filibuster-proof Senate. They knew the fragile recovery should not be tested with higher tax rates from the Clinton era. Ask them “what’s changed?” Force them to say the private economy is doing fine, BEFORE THE ELECTION!
We still need tax rates to stay where they are, and not to increase. Make it clear that there will be NO NEW BILL that changes tax rates for anyone until a new Congress is seated. Either the Democrats accept an extension of all the Bush-era tax rates, or the rates will expire, and the year-end processing for every business in the country will face the Clinton-era tax rates, which will represent a huge increase, and potentially crippling effects on our fragile recovery. Tell the Dems that every defense cut will be replaced as soon as Republicans are in charge, and that regrowth will require additional domestic spending cuts.
I remember Clinton’s “retroactive” tax increase causing a recession before the ’94 Republican takeover of the House & Senate. I also remember Bubba saying he “thought he raised our taxes too much too!”
The projected revenue of tax increases are never realized because people simply stop buying whatever is taxed or just stop spending.
The logic of raising taxes with less than 2% growth just doesn’t make sense. Then again, I didn’t attend a liberal Marxist college either.
China is going to have only an 8% growth this year! A communist country out producing the USA! Mr. Obama certainly has transformed our country!