Fooling nobody

Smoke, mirrors, and cheap deceptive blather.

Obama is completely hopeless. He suffers from the same mental disease that's been common to socialists all the way back, from Babeuf to Robert Owen to Marx/Engels and on forward. It's the twin delusions that people are malleable to any degree in their motivations, and that capitalism is a magical, eternal fount of money that can be confiscated and redistributed to establish the New Order. The result is always the same, a vastly powerful central government overseeing a ruined economy and an impoverished people. They simply cannot learn the clear lessons of history, seem to be emotionally unable to accept them.

Socialism is the most anti-humanist system ever developed, because it consistently sacrifices people to a theoretical system with a utopian vision of what people ought to be like, but are not, never were, and never will be. Economic failure, political repression, and mounds of corpses follow like night follows day.

Byron

Cantor: We need entitlements on the table, Mr. President

Obama proposed a five-year freeze on non-security discretionary spending. That accounts for around $450 billion in a $3.8 trillion budget, which has a deficit of $1.5 trillion. Obama claimed in his speech last night that a freeze in this spending would save $400 billion over the next decade, but that comes from simply eliminating the discretionary spending increases Obama himself projected over that period. It doesn’t “save” money in any sense except the Beltway definition of savings through decreases in projected spending increases.

Besides, $40 billion of savings a year against projected deficits of over a trillion dollars each of the next ten years (on average) leaves 96% of the deficits in place. That’s not even a good start; it’s barely even symbolic.

The only ways to end the deficits are through massive reforms of mandatory spending to get to the $2.4 trillion in spending it represents, as well as the discretionary spending on security that accounts for almost another trillion dollars. Until those are on the table, deficit reduction talk is not just cheap, but transparent.