Jeff Jacoby takes aim at Senator John Kerry in "Tea Party sounds a needed alarm."
But he [Kerry] ought to have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the Tea Partiers are not “absurd’’ to focus on budget cuts and entitlement reform - not when federal outlays have more than doubled (from $1.8 trillion to $3.8 trillion) in a decade. Not when entitlement payments are eating up two-thirds of the federal budget. Not when Washington has to borrow about 40 cents for every dollar it spends. And not when, as a result, the US debt burden has ballooned from 40.3 percent of GDP in 2008 to an alarming 72 percent this year - and growing.In explaining its downgrade, S&P did not call for the higher taxes that Kerry and many Democrats seek. Instead it said that the debt deal “fell well short’’ of the deficit reductions needed, that it provided only “modest savings’’ in discretionary spending, and that Congress was unwilling to curb Medicare and other entitlements, which is the “key to long-term fiscal sustainability.’’ That sounds an awful lot like what the Tea Party has been saying - except that the Tea Partiers were raising the alarm well before S&P got involved.
By a nearly 2-1 margin, Americans did not want the debt ceiling raised and yet, according to Kerry, it's the Tea Party that represents a fringe that should be censored.
5 comments:
In explaining its downgrade, S&P did not call for the higher taxes that Kerry and many Democrats seek.
Not true.
S&P explaining their downgrade:
“Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.
“We lowered our long-term rating on the U.S. because we believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed and will remain a contentious and fitful process.”
S&P ratings chief John Chambers on the Bush tax cuts:
"If you let them lapse for the high-income earners, that could give you another $950 billion."
By a nearly 2-1 margin, Americans did not want the debt ceiling raised
By the same margin, the same poll finds that Americans want taxes raised before spending cuts. All other polls agree.
http://ezkool.com/2011/08/multiple-poll-says-raise-taxes-before-spending-cuts/
They didn't ask me.
Yes, I've seen those many polls and I'm astounded that Americans want someone else to pay for things before their benefits are cut. Wow!
In this era of "shared sacrifice" how many Americans would agree to an across-the-board tax hike in exchange for keeping their benefits? Oh so few, I'll bet.
Hooray for poll results that I agree with!
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