Obama’s chickens are coming home to roost.
“I think we’re going over the cliff. It’s pretty clear to me they made a political calculation. This offer doesn’t remotely deal with entitlement reform in a way to save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security from imminent bankruptcy. It raises $1.6 trillion on job creators that will destroy the economy and there are no spending controls,” Graham said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.”
Graham had signaled a willingness to violate Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge to avert the fiscal cliff if Democrats made an effort to reform entitlements. But he said Sunday the White House’s plan for entitlement reform was laughable.
“I’m serious about revenue,” Graham said. “You can limit deductions to $40 or $50,000 a person, which takes care of the middle class. Upper income Americans will lose their deductions, and raise about $800 billion of revenue. But I’ll only do that if we do entitlement reform, and the president’s plan when it comes to entitlement reform is just, quite frankly a joke.”
It’s very difficult to draw any other conclusion from the president’s proposal than that he intends to go over the cliff and blame Republicans for the ensuing pain. Why else would he propose a plan with so many poison pills in it? The GOP will not accept $1.6 trillion in tax increases. He knows this, just as he knows that unless he deals with entitlements, there’s no chance the Republicans would agree to increased revenues in the first place. And the addition of $255 billion in stimulus money is indeed a cruel joke. No entitlement reform but a stim bill using borrowed money? How can anyone believe Obama is serious?
The press is treating Obama’s plan as reasonable despite its dearth of spending cuts — even targets for spending cuts. Why should the GOP even bother making a counterproposal when the two sides are on different planets when it comes to pulling back from the disaster that awaits us after January 1, 2013?
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