Noonan Nails One

In all of the commentary after the President's Speech the other day after the weak spending cuts passed by the Republican majority (but the promise of real cuts over the next three years -- we'll see), Peggy Noonan really sums up what the president sounded like here.

The speech was intellectually incoherent. An administration that spent two years saying, essentially, that high spending is good is suddenly insisting high spending is catastrophic. The president appealed for bipartisan efforts but his manner and approach leave his appeals sounding like diktats. His attempts to seem above the fray leave him seeming distanced and unwilling to risk anything.


Most important, the speech signaled that the White House, after all this time, sees the question of spending as a partisan tool, a weapon to be deployed in an election, and not an actual crisis. This is disrespectful toward citizens who feel honest alarm.

And that really sums it up.   More and more of his speeches are coming off this way.   His explanations are becoming Kerry-esque.  I voted for the war before I voted against it. 

This is a man who believes in "wealth redistribution", and not only wealth redistribution here in the United States, but redistribution of wealth from the United States to other Colonial era countries, to make up for past alleged and percieved wrongs.  But I believe that there is a vindictive streak in him that doesn't see a whole lot of difference between knocking the U.S. a few notches and consider that as a boost of these other countries being bumped up a few notches.  This kind of logic was expressed in the speech when he said

The fourth step in our approach is to reduce spending in the tax code. In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. And I refuse to renew them again.


Beyond that, the tax code is also loaded up with spending on things like itemized deductions. And while I agree with the goals of many of these deductions, like homeownership or charitable giving, we cannot ignore the fact that they provide millionaires an average tax break of $75,000 while doing nothing for the typical middle-class family that doesn’t itemize.

Got that?  It's HIS (the federal government's) money.  All of it.  The government pays us. It's the only way it makes sense to call lower taxes Government Spending.

This is why the left is always contradicting itself.  It has rationalized up to be down, left to be right, weak to be strong, tax cuts to be spending, and spending (actually giving money to tax payers) to be tax cuts.  That's gotta be a confusing world to live in.  It's a wierd "balance sheet" world -- the kind that gets companies like Enron into trouble.   "Well, we'll just call this tax break an expenditure and this expenditure a tax break and put it in a different column and nobody'll be the wiser.  And if they are, what are they going to do?  We'll call them Extremist Tea Baggers.  That'll shut 'em up. "