Beware of 'If-Then' Budget Deals

[Geee]

American Spectator:

From last week's events it's fair to conclude that President Obama and congressional Democrats are willing to risk default on America's debts in order to get tax increases.

On August 2 the government will run out of borrowed money, all $14 trillion of it. And -- despite what you heard from a few idiots posing as "constitutional scholars" last week -- under the 14th Amendment the president can't borrow more unless congress authorizes it.

So negotiations have gone on for months, in the Senate Gang of Six, the Biden-led talks and several White House meetings, all to no avail. The reason there has been no success is that the Democrats want $2 in tax hikes for every dollar in reduced spending and they want to delay the spending cuts so they don't take effect until a future date (before which they can renege on the deal and restore the cuts).

On July 5, playing the role of a marriage counselor, President Obama urged "both sides" to get out of their "comfort zones" to reach a debt ceiling deal. It was classic Obama: posing publicly as the disinterested arbiter urging compromise while privately making irreconcilable demands for tax hikes.
In June, after a disappointing May unemployment report, Obama said, "There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery." Last Friday, he ran into a bigger bump in the latest unemployment report. It showed that the supposed economic recovery has stalled.

Fully 9.2 percent of Americans -- over 14 million -- are unemployed, an increase of about 545,000 since March. (The 9.2 percent is misleadingly small given the fact that another 252,000 Americans had given up looking for a job and weren't counted among the unemployed.)