'Raise Taxes or Granny Gets It'

James Taranto on “The liberal media’s idea of a grown-up:”

President Obama is pulling out the big guns and pointing them straight at your grandmother. “Obama on Tuesday said he cannot guarantee that retirees will receive their Social Security checks August 3” absent an agreement with Congress to raise the debt ceiling, CBS News reports:

“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven’t resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley, according to excerpts released by CBS News.

At a press conference yesterday, Obama demanded that Republicans not only authorize trillions of dollars in new borrowing,which at this point seems unavoidable, but agree to what he called “massive, job-killing tax increases” effective in 2013–i.e., after what he expects will be his re-election.

For this he drew plaudits from what used to be called the mainstream media. “Obama Grasping Centrist Banner in Debt Impasse” read the New York Times headline. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza dubbed him “Dad-in-Chief,” explaining: “Boil Obama’s message down and you get this: Adults sometimes have to do things that they don’t want to do. This is one of those times. So, let’s get it done.”

The kids are acting up, so he threatens to starve Granny to death. That’s just how a strong father behaves.

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It was much more fun when it was a National Lampoon cover in the 1970s.

Related: Say, whatever happened to the $2.6 Trillion Social Security Trust Fund? As Merrill Matthews of Forbes writes, “either Obama and Geithner are lying to us now, or they and all defenders of the Social Security status quo have been lying to us for decades.  It must be one or the other.”

Perhaps this investigation might get to the bottom of it. If not, maybe Geraldo can.

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