Smoke and Mirrors and a Kidney Punch

I’ll give you the bullet points from the Daily Mail’s analysis of President Obama’s 2014 budget, because they’re instructive:

•White House promises $1.8 trillion in deficit reduction, although similar previous claims have been debunked

•New method of measuring cost-of-living increases will lower benefit payouts and push middle-class earners into higher tax brackets

•Speaker Boehner’s spokesperson: ‘Any deficit reduction will come exclusively from tax hikes’

•Administration’s formula depends on cost savings from Obamacare, which may be more costly to implement than previously thought

That first figure, $1.8 trillion, just ignore it. That’s jam yesterday, jam tomorrow — but never a spending cut today. Besides, even if it were real, it would “save” over a span of ten years about what the Democrats added to the debt in 2009 alone. We’re still using the Visa to pay the MasterCard to cover the groceries.

The COLA adjustment is real enough, but still fudge-able. As I understand it, the alternate CPI calculation still puts bureaucrats in charge of determining how much additional money goes out, and all they’ll need is a nudge in the “right” direction.

That last point? About ObamaCare saving money? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. That’s not even jam tomorrow. The most recent CBO calculations show ObamaCare exploding the deficit, and that’s before we find out how it “works” in practice. My, I’m full of scare quotes this morning.

The third point is the real one. Everything else — the CPI massage, the ObamaCare BS, the pretend cuts — they’re all just smoke and mirrors to provide cover for the one thing Obama really wants, for the only thing he really cares about. And that, of course, is socking it to “the rich” with yet another tax hike.

They’ve got to be made to pay, so Obama can “spread the wealth around a little bit.” Or a lot. And even if there isn’t nearly as much to spread. Because that’s what vile progs do.

You can’t “care” about misery without punishing success. That’s how you motivate low-information voters to the polls, as we discovered last November. It’s a neat trick, and after a century the Democrats might finally have perfected it.