United Liberty

News broke yesterday as excerpts of Bob Woodward’s new book, The Price of Politics, were leaked to the press. Woodward, who has written a number of books about administrations, recounted the debt ceiling fight that took place last year and offered some behind-the-scenes information on negotiations between President Barack Obama and House Republicans.

What we’ve learned thus far isn’t all that flattering to the White House, painting the picture of a president that was excluded from the process at one point as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) tried to workout a deal:

Woodward portrays a president who remained a supreme believer in his own powers of persuasion, even as he faltered in efforts to coax congressional leaders in both parties toward compromise. Boehner told Woodward that at one point, when Boehner voiced concern about passing the deal they were working out, the president reached out and touched his forearm.

“John, I’ve got great confidence in my ability to sway the American people,” Boehner quotes the president as having told him.

But after the breakthrough agreement fell apart, Boehner’s “Plan B” would ultimately exclude the president from most of the key negotiations. The president was “voted off the island,” in Woodward’s phrase, even by members of his own party, as congressional leaders patched together an eleventh hour framework to avoid default.

Frustration over the lack of clear White House planning was voiced to Obama’s face at one point, with a Democratic congressional staffer taking the extraordinary step of confronting the president in the Oval Office.

With Congress out of session, the party conventions going on and other issues coming to the forefront of the presidential race, the looming tax hikes seem to have fallen to the side, at least for now.

President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats have insisted that House Republicans go along with raising tax rates on the income earners making over $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000. House Republicans have balked at this over fears that raising taxes, particular during a time of slow job growth, would further hurt the economy. In response to this particular concern, Democrats and apologists of their policies often point to the economic boom during the late 1990s, which occured after then-President Bill Clinton’s tax hikes were passed.

Writing at the Heritage Foundation, Curtis Dubay dispels this myth of Clinton’s presidency, noting that the economy did not live up to its full potential after taxes were raised in the 1990s:

Clinton signed his tax hike into law in September 1993, the same year he took office. It included an increase of the top marginal tax rate from 31 percent to 39.6 percent; repeal of the cap on the 2.9 percent Medicare tax, applying it to every dollar of income instead of capping it to levels of income like the Social Security tax; a 4.3 cent increase in the gas tax; an increase in the taxable portion of Social Security benefits; and a hike of the corporate income tax rate from 34 percent to 35 percent, among other tax increases.

As Democrats kicked off their convention yesterday in Charlotte, North Carolina, the United States crossed an ominous threshold as the national debt clock crossed the $16 trillion mark — nearly $51,000 per citizen. While we should understand that the national debt and unfunded liabilities were already unsustainable over the long term, President Barack Obama has done little to rein them in.

During his term in office, President Obama has overseen four consecutive years of $1+ trillion budget deficits, adding some $5.375 trillion dollars to the national debt since during that time. This is the same man who slammed the deficits of George W. Bush on the campaign trail in 2008. Obama, then a U.S. Senator from Illinois, told supporters, “The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents — [Bush] added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child.” Obama said that this was “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic.”

During an interview on Face the Nation, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley was asked by Bob Schieffer if the country was better off today that it was four years ago. O’Malley, who is thought to be looking at a presidential run in 2016, stunningly admitted that it’s not:

No,” replied O’Malley, a prominent Obama surrogate, adding “but that’s not the question of this election.”

“Without a doubt, we are not as well off as we were before George Bush brought us the Bush job losses, the Bush recessions, the Bush deficits, the series of desert wars, charged for the first time to credit cards — the national credit card,” he added, according to a transcript.

At least part of his initial response was honest, that being that the country isn’t better off. He’s since backed off that statement. But look, there is not question that Bush is responsible for huge budget deficits, but President Obama hasn’t exactly done anything to put an end to the river of red ink flowing from Washington. If fact, with four years of $1 trillion budget deficits, he’s made it worse.

Written by Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst at the Cato Institute. It was originally posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, and is cross-posted with permission from Cato @ Liberty.

Speaking outside a helicopter museum in eastern Pennsylvania yesterday, Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan bemoaned the “irresponsible defense cuts” and subsequent job losses that would occur under the Budget Control Act’s sequestration spending cuts. That would be the same Budget Control Act that Paul Ryan voted for, and, at least initially, defended.

From TalkingPointsMemo.com:

“What conservatives like me have been fighting for, for years, are statutory caps on spending, legal caps in law that says government agencies cannot spend over a set amount of money,” Ryan told FOX News’s Sean Hannity shortly after the agreement was reached last August. “And if they breach that amount across the board, sequester comes in to cut that spending, and you can’t turn that off without a super-majority vote. We got that in law.”

It’s not just Ryan’s backing away from the BCA’s spending cuts that’s irritating; it’s the fact that he’s basing his opposition to the cuts on the same flawed Keynesian rationale that the president used to justify his failed stimulus package. As Chris Edwards has noted, shifting resources from the government sector to the private sector is good for the economy:

It’s time for conservatives to stop using the Left’s argument that government spending creates jobs, and get serious about cutting wasteful military spending. So says Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, in this video produced by my Cato colleagues Caleb Brown and Austin Bragg.

“Conservatives need to remember that just as spending money on something called ‘education’doesn’t mean people are educated, and spending money on ‘welfare’ doesn’t mean it adds to the General Welfare. Calling something ‘national defense’ doesn’t mean it is. It may not be. It may undermine national defense if it’s a waste of resources.” - Grover Norquist

As Mitt Romney and Republicans complain about cuts to defense spending as a part of the sequestion agreement that agreed to last year, Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, told Caleb Brown of Cato Institute in yesterday’s daily podcast that these spending cuts need to be on the table.

By the way, if you’re not already subscribing to the Cato Daily Podcast, you should, either via iTunes or by RSS.

Written by Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. Posted with permission from Cato @ Liberty.

Lots of other stories have dominated the headlines lately, so people have paid little attention to news that House and Senate leaders have settled on a plan to fund the government for the first half of fiscal 2013 through a continuing resolution.

Senator Reid’s press release states that the agreement “will avoid a government shutdown while funding the government at $1.047 trillion.” If only that were true. The president’s most recent budget estimates that federal outlays will be something more like $3.8 trillion.

Whatever the case on the total figures, this is a good time to be asking just what will be in that six-month extension of government funding. And I’m particularly interested in whether it will continue to fund our national ID law, the REAL ID Act.

Note: This is part three of a three-part series covering some reasons that a voter may choose to support a specific presidential candidate. Part 1 for Mitt Romney is available here, and part 2 for Barack Obama is available here.

The budget deficit for the current fiscal year is expected to hit $1 trillion any day now and the increasing national debt exponentially in the last four years. And while some apologists for Obama insist that he has been fiscally responsible, the claim simply doesn’t hold water.

Back in 2008, then-Sen. Obama lashed out at the budget busting deficits of President Bush, calling it “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic.” During his first campaign, Obama said that he would deliver a “net-spending cut” during his first term in office. But a new ad from Americans for Prosperity should remind voters of these broken promises and the fiscal turmoil that President Obama only exacerbated: