Waiting for the enemy to blink
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
What we’ve got is war—a war between the taxpayers
and the tax-eaters. The tax-eaters can’t understand
why the taxpayers won’t shovel out the swag, salute
as usual, and shut up. This time the taxpayers are
fed up and they’re not going to take it any more.
President Obama, the swag man for the tax-eaters,
can’t understand why the Republicans won’t join his
crusade to add trillions of dollars—that’s trillions
with a ‘t’, not even billions with a ‘b’—to the
burden of the taxpayers.
Mr. Obama has never met a tax he didn’t want to kiss
and cuddle, and can’t give up his itch to cuddle
these new trillions. He pouts that it’s the
Republicans, not him, who hold the “my way or the
highway” attitude. He won’t sign “a 30-day, or a
60-day or 90-day extension” of the debt limit, even
to keep the economy from a crash.
The GOP insists on the Harry Truman English the Tea
Party irregulars employ to call a tax by its right
name.
Adding trillions of dollars in new taxes, an
Associated Press analysis reveals, will fall hardest
on small-business owners and low- and middle-income
families trying to reach for more prosperity. The
president does not speak of this, focusing instead
on the very few of the very rich.
In his frantic push for more taxes—his latest
attempt to apply his medicine to an economy with an
unemployment rate of 9.2 percent and rising—the
president channels Marie Antoinette. He berates “tax
breaks for millionaires and billionaires, oil
companies, hedge-fund managers and corporate jet
owners.” Like Mzz Antoinette puzzling over why poor
Frenchmen hungry for bread couldn’t eat cake, the
president can’t understand why a baron of Wall
Street would settle for a little Grumman or Falcon,
even with a tax credit. The president has a Boeing
747, equipped with all the gadgets Silicon Valley
can dream up, standing ready to take him and
Michelle to Gotham to shed tears for the poor over a
$400 dinner.
He won’t talk about “taxes”. He speaks fluent
euphemy. “What we need to do is to have a balanced
approach where everything is on the table.” Hear
this: “We need to take on spending in the tax code.”
Or try this: “You can’t reduce the deficit to the
levels that it needs to be reduced without having
some revenue in the mix.” Who said anything about
raising taxes? Who doesn’t like “balance” and
“revenue”?
Mr. Obama, with his trillions-dollar “grand
bargain”, is flailing about in frustration because
the Republicans refuse to speak euphemy, the
preferred tongue of Capitol Hill, and doggedly talk
in the Harry Truman English the Tea Party irregulars
employ to call a tax by its right name. (This has
the added benefit of being kind to the language.)
Mr. Obama came to Washington as the master of pulpit
rhetoric and he’s choking on mixed metaphors: “Pull
off the Band-Aid. Eat our peas. Now’s the time to do
it.” But who wants icky peas that have spent several
days under someone’s Band-Aid? Not even Maxim’s of
Paris could make a tasty dish of “Petits Pois sous
Band-Aid.”
Euphemism, however vague, cute or inexact, won’t
work this time if the Republicans can resist the
urge, preserved deep within their DNA, to fold in
the clutch. Taxes are an affliction that everyone
understands; a CBS News poll finds that more than 60
percent of all Americans think Congress should not
raise the debt ceiling. This obviously doesn’t mean
the 60 percent think we should become deadbeats,
like certain Europeans. The 60 percent understands
that the prospect of default is all that can
persuade Democrats drunk on spending that ruinous,
reckless and irresponsible profligacy is an
addiction with limits.
Maggie Thatcher years ago diagnosed the terminal
ailment of socialists. “They always run out of other
people’s money.” Sarah Palin, who sets liberal teeth
on edge with her gift of cutting colorfully to the
chase, observes that “the Sugar Daddy has run out of
money.” We haven’t run out of money, not quite yet,
but we take the ladies’ point.
The Democrats cry that the Republicans must agree to
these tax increases or risk default because
Democrats are incapable of making the cuts in
spending to prevent default. Naturally the
Republicans could understand this if they weren’t so
pathologically dumb and willfully unable to learn
from their betters. David Brooks of the New York
Times, the most eloquent media voice for this view,
says Republicans no longer have a “sense of moral
decency” and can’t accept the “legitimacy” of
“intellectual authorities.” What he means is that
the taxpayers have finally got the tax-eaters’
number, and the “intellectual authorities” might as
well get used to it.