Obama huddles with labor leaders, liberal activists

President Obama is hosting a closed-door White House meeting Tuesday morning with labor leaders and liberal activists to discuss his stance in negotiations with House Republicans on the looming budgetary fiscal cliff.

One day later, Mr. Obama plans to have a similar private discussion with business leaders.

Vice President Joe Biden will also attend the Tuesday's gathering, which is being billed as a discussion of "the actions we need to take to keep our economy growing and find a balanced approach to reduce our deficit," according to a White House release.

Several labor leaders plan on attending, including Mary Kay Henry of the Service Employees International Union; Lee Sanders of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; Dennis Van Roekel of the National Education Association; and Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO.

Activists who planned to attend include Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress; John Podesta of the Center for American Progress; Bob Greenstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities; Laura Burton Capps of Common Purpose Project; Max Richtman of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare; Justin Ruben of MoveOn; and Deepak Bhargava of the Center for Community Change.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2012/nov/13/obama-huddles-labor-leaders-liberal-activists/#ixzz2C82qZh4g

PK’s Note: Yeah, because labor union people and liberal activists will know how to fix the economic problems.

Sex Scandal Reveals Why There is a Benghazi Coverup

Since the 9/11 attack on the U.S consulate in Benghazi, we've been told an anti-Islam YouTube video was to blame. We know the consulate was attacked multiple times throughout 2012 and U.S Ambassador Chris Stevens had received multiple threats from al Qaeda before being killed on 9/11 with three other Americans.

From the beginning the story never added up and the YouTube video excuse has been proven a complete lie, but the recent revelations of an affair between General David Petraeus and biographer Paula Broadwell may have given us the missing link to this whole thing. It isn't the affair itself that gives us more information, but the affair bringing attention to words spoken by Broadwell in Denver on October 26. She said the CIA was holding prisoners at the annex in Benghazi and Fox News has confirmed with another source this was the case.

This explains two things. The U.S. consulate in Benghazi was being repeatedly attacked because prisoners were being held and because President Obama signed an executive order in 2009 banning secret CIA prisons, they had to find an alternative story to cover-up what really happened, hence the YouTube video.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/11/13/sex_scandal_reveals_why_there_is_a_benghazi_coverup

English prof can't 'find one crime Stalin committed'

Dr. Grover Furr, an English professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, told students that dictator Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Russia regime never murdered millions of people, contra popular belief.

“I have yet to find one crime — yet to find one crime — that Stalin committed,” Furr said. “I know they all say he killed 20, 30, 40 million people — it is bulls--t. ...[Nazi propagandist] Goebbels said that the Big Lie is successful and this is the Big Lie: that the Communists — that Stalin killed millions of people and that socialism is no good.” The allusion to Nazi propaganda came after his interlocutor began to suggest that Furr was using Goebbels’ tactic.

Furr was supposed to represent the liberal position in a debate with a conservative and a libertarian hosted by the Young Americans for Liberty.

PK's Note -- be very afraid. This is what your kids have been indoctrinated with in schools. Listen how they laugh.

The Tea Party at Valley Forge

By Timothy C. Daughtry

The patriot movement had its Concord Bridge moment in 2010, and now it is facing its winter at Valley Forge. Both liberal and mainstream politicians are waiting to see what the patriot movement does during the harsh winter of a second Obama term.

Conservative opinion sites are buzzing with ideas about what to do now. One school of thought holds that the damage done to America in a second Obama term will be irreparable, and that the only sensible strategy is to let the system collapse under the weight of Obama's policies, and then to rebuild afterwards. Another theme seems to be that patriots should endure, double down on our efforts, and fight on.

The first strategy hopes that a new birth of freedom will rise phoenix-like from the ashes of Obama's policies. Ironically, that thinking can be seen as a conservative variation of the Cloward-Piven strategy that advocated the deliberate overloading of the welfare system. Out of the collapse of that system would emerge a popular demand for a guaranteed national income and fulfillment of other leftist goals.

The conservative strategy does not try to overload the system, but simply acknowledges that Obama has both the power and the plan to overload and collapse it. Liberal theorists and conservatives agree that Obama's policies will bring our current system down; the big difference is in what we hope to see emerging from the ashes.

The phoenix strategy assumes that the dry rot of liberalism will so weaken the country after four more years that recovery will be impossible. Government control of healthcare is now firmly established, and not much stands between the radical left and control of every other aspect of our lives. The most radical regime in American history is about to make several Supreme Court appointments that will wield unchecked power for decades to come. The vote-buying spree will continue, the shrinking productive class will be taxed even more, and the national debt will go from dangerous to catastrophic. The far left controls our schools and most of the news media, so resistance to the regime's agenda by elected patriots will be played as obstructionism and backwardness. Under that pressure, many will pull a Chris Christie and cozy up to the left for political cover.

The prescription for national collapse has been written, and the phoenix strategy suggests that we just wait for it to be filled.

The advantage of fighting to the end, on the other hand, is that patriots can always fall back on the phoenix strategy if we fail. Even if conservatives accomplish nothing more than slowing America's decline, which is all we have really done for decades, our ideas and values will still be preserved by the conservative remnant when the reset happens.

For those patriots who choose to stay in the movement, however, we need a new strategy, and that begins with thinking differently about politics. We have to think long-term, and we have to get off defense and start playing offense.

First, the patriot movement needs to learn from success of the left's "long march" strategy and develop a long-term mindset. In retrospect, the tea party's landslide victory in 2010 came easily, and it probably gave the movement unrealistic expectations about 2012. The patriot movement had barely begun to organize in 2010, and yet it routed the radicals of the Obama regime as handily as that earlier generation of patriots had routed the British at Concord Bridge.

In the closing pages of Waking the Sleeping Giant: How Mainstream Americans Can Beat Liberals at Their Own Game, we warned our fellow patriots that "along the road from the victory at Concord Bridge to the victory at Yorktown lay that winter at Valley Forge." Just as King George III would not give up control over his subjects easily, those who would rule over us today will not easily give up the benefits of power and privilege. Years of liberal rule have made America an economically and spiritually sick country, and the path back to health will not be easy or quick. Our time in Valley Forge does not mean that we are defeated, only that recovery will not happen in one generation.

There is an old military adage for leaders in dire circumstances that you have to take the situation as you find it and turn it to your advantage, and that is the challenge for the patriot movement now. Our situation is dire, so we should go on the offensive. We have to stall the left's advance in 2014 by keeping the House and taking the Senate, and then blocking the most radical court appointees. Find our candidate for 2016 now, and start preparing for the ground game on Election Day.

The left is hoping that the tea party movement is dead. Now is the time to organize, to train, to demonstrate, and to educate a nation in distress. We have to learn how to make the left debate on our terms instead of constantly letting the left define who we are.

If we lose, there is still the phoenix strategy.

The Price of Folly

By William J. Meisler

The ancient Greek word pleonexia meant "wanting to have more of something for oneself than is proper, fit or to be expected." It was akin to hybris, in that it expressed the concept of transgressing normal or appropriate boundaries. In modern terms, I would include in that definition, "wanting or expecting to have more for oneself than one has earned" -- i.e. expecting someone else to pay the bill or carry the freight.

I believe this is the root of many of America's problems these days, particularly with regard to fiscal matters. A prime example of pleonexia can be found in the whining attitude of people today, well illustrated in a comparison of the hard times experienced by pioneering families in the nineteenth century vs. the so-called hard times of today. Unfortunately, the whining about today's "hard times" is not confined to a few malcontents, but has spread to much of the population. It is the inevitable result of prolonged prosperity and easy circumstances which cause a people to lose all sense of balance and judgment. It reminds me of a question asked by Vernon Howard in one of his books, "Is it possible that you may be thinking your problems into existence?"

When I hear all the complaining about how hard life is today, or people whining about having to pay for their own health care, or not having enough money for a comfortable retirement or house, etc., and then reflect on how ninety percent of the rest of the world must still live today, lacking, often for their whole live, things that we Americans take for granted such as food, running water, and a dry, clean place to sleep, I cannot help but conclude that too many Americans display a most unhealthy degree of pleonexia. Gratitude and responsible self-control have degenerated into entitlement and self-pity, prudence and sobriety into carelessness and license, and consequently all sense of proportion has been lost. That is what afflicts Americans today, and our present fiscal and social morass is a reflection of that transformation.

What inevitably follows pleonexia or hybris is what the Greeks termed ate, an act of folly that leads to the kind of disaster all too familiar from Greek tragedy. In the case of health care, for example the act of folly of the American people is taking the excellent health care that they receive for granted, considering it an entitlement, and complaining about having to pay for it, all of which are acts of ingratitude and recklessness which contrast with the situation of billions living in squalor worldwide who are forced to do without medical care and who would willingly give half a year's wages or more, if necessary, to receive even the most basic but necessary care. The unfortunate transformation that we are starting to see in our health care system, signs of which are appearing more and more frequently every day, is the inevitable consequence of that act of folly, and is to be expected, because in a moral universe no disproportionate act of moral folly ultimately goes unopposed, without which it would not be possible to restore the moral balance to the universe.

Likewise, the ate that the American people have exhibited in considering our Constitution expendable in the face of its requirement that the people be moral, self-responsible, industrious, and sufficiently informed in order to benefit from the Constitution's benevolence. Our people began to lose these qualities more than one hundred years ago, but the process significantly accelerated during the 1960's and ever since. In other words, we are no longer worthy of the Constitution as it was originally intended, and indeed it would seem that the bulk of the population -- perhaps unwittingly but nevertheless most decidedly -- has made that choice in the face of the baubles of the welfare state. A fateful and historic choice, not just for us, but for mankind as a whole. It brings to mind a line delivered by Claude Rains in the movie Casablanca, spoken after Humphrey Bogart has roughly dismissed his French girlfriend: "How extravagant you are, throwing away women like that. Someday they may be scarce." So I would say, with a slight paraphrase, to the American people, "How extravagant you are, throwing away your Constitution like that. Don't you know that someday it will be scarce?" Although on second thought, I confess that my question could be regarded as superfluous, as it seems that our Constitution already is in the process of becoming scarce.

Evidently the hard times experienced by the nation during the last four years, both in the domestic and foreign arenas, have not been hard enough. Like Pharaoh who hardened his heart after every plague and would not let the Hebrews go, too many Americans hardened their hearts against acknowledging their pleonexia and instead re-elected the very instrument of their misfortune (yet another example of ate). It is clear now that we shall have to pay the full penalty, the full ten plagues if you will, in order to restore balance to the moral order.

Thus I anticipate that there will be much, much more unaccustomed suffering in America. I do not say this out of despair; it is the way of things.

Not What If, What Next Part III – Breaking The 4th Seal

Blowing Up The Entire System That Generates Liberal Inertia

By: Repair_Man_Jack

What can you do about someone who owns an issue but feels absolutely zero sense of responsibility to anyone whom it causes harm? Brett Stevens of Amerika.org describes what results below.

“In short, demagoguery arises from democracy. At that point, the winner will buy out the voters. Don’t come up with a long-term plan; offer each identifiable group an identifiable bone so they know you’ll give them something. This isn’t voting as duty, it’s trading votes for promises. The hidden Achilles Heel is that these unrealistic promises tend to distribute the wealth, power and authority needed to make important decisions, and as such both paralyze the nation and reduce the function and thus value of its economy.”

When the system becomes irredeemably corrupt, then !BOOM! Must go the dynamite. In his post today, he stipulates the following platform plank for American Conservatism.

Smash the entitlement state. Make it a cornerstone of our platform: we don’t want a Soviet-style system or even a European socialist one where everyone is guaranteed something, and thus there’s no incentive to perform and paralytic high internal costs. We want a system that rewards performance and can move quickly.

Like all platform planks, this one must be translated down to street-level reality so that comprehensive, measureable action can be taken to implement the intended results. It starts in the House of Representatives and continues all the way down to the man on the street. Here’s how we can make a major start on blowing up the modern American Leftism Machine.

Demand that the House to do the following.

1) Pass a budget that totally allows the US to go off the Fiscal Cliff. Remind President Obama that he and they made a deal that they intend to honor to the letter as a show of good faith and bipartisan agreement that all Americans should emulate in current and parlous predicament.

2) Refuse a continuing resolution until the US Senate does likewise. Remind them that bipartisanship is always a two-way street and the US Senate does have a professional responsibility with respect to the Federal budget process.

3) When the Senate self-righteously and arrogantly refuses, refuse to raise the debt ceiling, citing the fact that it is irresponsible to issue more debt when you have no coherent statement as to how those funds are intended to be spent.

4) When Barack Obama rails against them, remind him firmly, yet politely that the House has passed a budget and stands more than willing to work with the US Senate anytime they choose to actually fulfill their legal and Constitutional obligations.

The man on the street should do as many already are. Do not hire full-time help unless you absolutely have to. Do not invest in securities that are taxable unless they are far and away the best option for future returns. Obey the law, remain pacifist towards your neighbors, but engage in no action that unnecessarily funds the Federal Government. Make them loot another target to fund the continuing entitlements. They will eventually be unable to afford it and will have to scale back and break promises.

When the promises of a free lunch become constrained, limited and eventually untenable, the simple faith an increasing share of the electorate puts in liberalism will be destroyed by hard reality. Then, we can restructure American Society in a way so that parasitism is discouraged and hard work and sound civic responsibility is by necessity inculcated into the fiber of our next generation. Until then let loose the Pale Rider.

http://www.redstate.com/2012/11/13/not-what-if-what-next-part-iii-breaking-the-4th-seal/

Our Path Forward Is Not Moderation, It Is Infrastructure

By: Aaron Gardner

…I don’t believe our answers lie in the GOP any more. As a friend said to me, parties exist to win elections, if they aren’t doing that what is the purpose?

…The parties cannot engage in a permanent ground game that encourages out of cycle voter outreach efforts. For one, it would put the parties at risk of violating some obscure facet of our mash of state and federal campaign finance laws, which were purposely built to diminish the role of parties in their own campaigns.

What donors need to understand is that the infrastructure that we must build must be built on the outside and maintained long term until they become self sustaining operations able to provide investigative journalism, opposition research, voter identification and outreach, and various other tasks that many still believe the parties are capable of and actually doing.

Building the infrastructure in the individual states and leaving them in control will allow for a diverse system that can play to their individual strengths in state level races while also providing a conduit for coordination at the national level.

This infrastructure should be fueled by causes, not policy, not white papers, not poll tested messaging meant to peel away small portions of your opponents base. Causes are what inspire people to act en masse, a candidate with no clear cause is bound to lose.

We do have a serious problem with our ability to reach voters, especially minorities. Immigration policy has been a thorn in our side and whether you support amnesty or a border fence, if you are a Republican, you are still a bigot. No matter whether one is for, against, or evolving on the issue, they are sure to be wrong. This suggests there is something greater than policy positions at play.

We can choose to moderate our positions on issues like gay marriage, immigration, abortion and more, but simply changing policies does not guarantee any lasting relationship with supporters of those policies.

Additionally, this unnecessarily limits the battle field at the state level to economics, and contrary to recent popular belief, this isn’t enough to win an election.

Instead, I suggest we champion our causes and build an infrastructure to engage. We need to take a page from the Special Operations community and train force multipliers who can go into communities where we are not engaged and meet these voters where they are. We need to do this not to attain forgiveness for our bigotry, we need to do this because the conservative message of freedom and opportunity espoused by Reagan and Kemp is exactly what many of these people came to America for in the first place.

In addition to minority outreach, this infrastructure should have a focus on properly training activists in the state. Looking back on election day, I am stunned by how many poll watchers I saw with cameras. It gave me a lot of hope that we would be able to break some big election day stories. One snag, many of these hard working activists had no clue how to get a video off of their phone and uploaded to either youtube or a shared cloud drive.

Overall this may seem like a minor thing, but if we haven’t trained our activists to use basic equipment, I am sure we failed to train them on a multitude of other levels as well.

In Colorado I have noticed that the progressives dominate the Twitter hash tags for state and local politics. This shouldn’t be. New media, such as twitter, is taking over as the preferred delivery model for messaging and at the state level I believe conservatives are falling behind.

The left is represented very well at the state level on social media. ProgressNow, Common Cause, various gay activists groups and pro-abortion groups, are always on responding in real time to news and events. Their infrastructure gives them quick access to a stockpile of unified messages produced by New Media Outlets, friendly pollsters, non-partisan issue advocacy groups and more.

We have no such ability and most of our time on twitter is spent fighting national battles rather than state battles. With our absence the left is able to put forward a narrative that ties state level candidates to national races and messaging, putting our candidates in the position of defending policies they never intended on running on. You don’t win elections when you are forced into a defensive posture.

The Democrats have built this infrastructure and have tuned it finely enough that I mistook a serious drop in funds flowing to the infrastructure in Colorado as a sign of their decay rather than their efficiency. I could not have been more wrong.

As Al Shaw reports on Pro Pulica, the infrastructure created on the left spent less than $2 per vote while the combined effort of Team Romney and disparate outside groups resulted in a cost of $6.35 per vote. Clearly were are at a serious disadvantage.

GOP donors, or more specifically conservative donors, need to realize that our future as a movement is dependent upon us creating an infrastructure that provides a coalition of forces working year round to inform, build relationships with, and turnout voters at all levels in all elections.

This will provide us with greater longevity long term than the misguided idea of trying to be a better Santa Claus and sacrificing large portions of our base in a purge of Social Conservatism.

The path forward isn’t moderation, it is infrastructure.

http://www.redstate.com/2012/11/12/our-path-forward-is-not-moderation-it-is-infrastructure/

From Heritage Foundation: The Threats of a Lame Duck Congress

The lame-duck session begins today, with retiring and defeated Members of Congress coming back to Washington to make their last legislative decisions. Because of the lack of accountability to voters, the lame-duck period brings heightened scrutiny.

Congress has 16 working days scheduled between now and the end of the year, though it could add more. Here are some of the contentious issues likely to be debated—and perhaps even decided—during that time.

The “fiscal cliff.” Thanks to legislation previously put in place, a series of federal spending cuts and tax increases is scheduled to go into effect automatically at the beginning of the year. This is widely referred to as a “fiscal cliff”—and the economy is headed right off the cliff. The tax increases, which have been dubbed “Taxmageddon,” would hit middle-class families with an average tax hike of more than $4,100 in the year 2013 alone. It is the largest tax increase ever to hit America, at nearly $500 billion in one year. The effects would be devastating to the economy, as it would hit job-creating small businesses. With the economy in the state it has been, American businesses and individuals cannot stand a tax increase.

Defense cuts. Liberals in Congress set up a plan called “sequestration” that has held the U.S. military hostage to their desire to raise taxes. The original plan was to convince other congressmen to cave to tax increases, thus preventing the cuts to defense. Now those cuts are scheduled to take effect in January, and they would deeply harm our military readiness. During the presidential foreign policy debate, President Obama declared that sequestration “will not happen.” Yet he has already factored these cuts into his fiscal planning for the future—a telling sign. Heritage has suggestions that would fix the sequestration problem without raising taxes.

The debt ceiling. Sound familiar? Yes, the federal government is once more approaching its debt limit—and lawmakers will likely try to raise the limit again. Heritage maintains that the U.S. has no business raising the debt ceiling without getting spending under control.

Disaster funding. Damage from Hurricane Sandy will continue the debate over who should fund disaster recovery efforts. The resources of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are stretched thin after years of record-setting numbers of disaster declarations. The agency has been forced to respond to disasters on the scale of one every one-and-a-half days.

Law of the Sea Treaty or other United Nations treaties. Senator John Kerry (D-MA) had expressed the intention of bringing the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) up for a lame-duck vote. But a group of conservative Senators pledged before the election that they would “oppose efforts to consider a treaty during” the lame-duck session. As a rule, the United Nations treaties would give up pieces of American sovereignty in return for little to no benefits to America. LOST in particular would require the U.S. to hand over royalties from oil and gas development and create a massive international bureaucracy that Americans would be forced to fund.

Cybersecurity. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has said he wanted to bring cybersecurity legislation back to the Senate floor during lame duck. As Heritage’s David Inserra explains, Reid’s approach “believes that government-set standards and regulations will make the private sector improve its security. They argue that any defense, however flawed or costly, is better than nothing.” At the same time, President Obama has drafted an executive order to put much of the failed legislation into effect. Neither of these would effectively help the nation’s cybersecurity—“There is no way that regulations will be able to keep up with the rapidly changing threat, since it takes major regulations from two to three years to be written.”

On the Edge

By Anthony J.Ciani

The election is over and the fiscal cliff is looming. It is time to get back to Washington, roll up the sleeves, find some common ground, and fix the problem. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX, retiring) has assured us that both Democrats and Republicans are intent on confronting the situation, so we can all relax, right?
Unfortunately, Senator Hutchison is wrong. There is not one, but several fiscal cliffs, and depending on your party or your philosophy, these cliffs are different, mostly contradictory, and demand completely opposite solutions. Compromise can only be reached on common ground, but the only common ground is that there is a problem, and something needs to be done, soon. It is extremely important that the right thing be done, because should the wrong thing be done, not only will the problem persist, but it will be made worse.

So what are these cliffs? If you are a Democrat, the first cliff is the debt ceiling. Should Congress fail to authorize the borrowing of more money, the Federal government will be unable to pay about 43% of its bills, necessitating drastic and immediate spending cuts. The lack of government spending will plunge the economy into a second recession. The second cliff is the end of the Bush tax cuts. The increase in taxes on the poor and middle class will take money out of their pockets, and so being unable to spend it, the economy will fall into a second recession due to lack of consumption. The prescribed Democratic solution is to immediately borrow a lot more money, raise taxes on the wealthy, cut taxes on everyone else, grow the economy (through government spending), and spend like mad.

If you are a Republican, the first cliff is the end of the Bush tax cuts. The increased taxes on high earners and on dividends (for everyone) will remove money that might have been used for reinvestment in companies or to create jobs. Rather than creating jobs, companies will lay off workers to buffer their margins against the increased taxes, and the economy will continue to fester or even end up in a deeper recession. The second cliff is the debt ceiling and annual deficit. Should Congress approve additional borrowing without a plan to pay it back, potential lenders will lose faith in the U.S. dollar, making it increasingly difficult for the government to borrow money. Unable to borrow the money, the government will need to turn to the printing press, the end result of which is runaway inflation, and poor and middle class people will become destitute. The prescribed Republican solution is to borrow a little more money, keep taxes low for everyone (or even cut them more), grow the economy, cut spending a lot, and aim to start paying down the debt within a decade.

The cliffs really are quite different, and there are only three points of agreement: borrowing more, growing the economy, and cutting taxes on the poor and middle class; except, for Republicans, while borrowing more is part of the solution, it is also part of the problem, and so must be done as part of a larger plan to stop borrowing. If we cut spending, we go over the Democrats' cliff. If we keep spending, we go over the Republicans' cliff. If taxes go up on the high earners, we go over the Republicans' cliff; but if taxes go down, we go over the Democrats' cliff. Going over any cliff will harm the economy and make the problem worse. We need to know which cliffs are real, but even more important; the proposed solutions might not be enough to stop us from going over any cliff.

Consider an economy with 100% taxation on net business income. Within 10 to 20 years, such an economy will disappear. No one will start or grow a business because there is no way to recoup the initial investment. Businesses established before the 100% tax rate will slowly disappear, until there are no businesses left.
High taxes kill an economy, while low taxes neither hurt nor help. The effective rate on business is the total tax paid divided by the net income of the business. History shows that the harmless effective rate, the rate below which total taxes no longer hurt an economy, is around 10%. The fester effective rate, the rate at which an economy neither grows nor shrinks, changes with population growth and money supply, but for the current United States, it seems to be right around or slightly below the Bush tax rates. In other words, if the Bush taxes are extended again or made permanent, our economy will simply fester, perhaps even slowly shrink. If taxes are cut yet again, our economy will grow.

Personal tax rates are a little bit different, but follow the same basic rule. People need extra money in their pockets, businesses need the extra money in peoples' pockets, but excessive taxes take away that extra money. The Federal taxes on personal income are already harmless for the vast majority of Americans. It is the state and local taxes that are killing the personal part of our economy, and there is nothing the Feds can do about those, except to cut or not raise the Federal personal rates.

With multiple historical examples and solid math, it is the Republicans who are correct as to the tax cliff. For the borrowing cliff, the Republicans are again supported by math and historical examples of runaway inflation, while the Democrats are actually contradicted by history and math. The solution needs to be small tax cuts (from the Bush rates) and significantly less borrowing, which means significantly less spending.
What is the working proposal, and what will it do? Republicans are still pushing for moderate spending cuts, while President Obama has advocated for a "balanced" approach. By "balanced", Obama means that spending cuts should be matched dollar-to-dollar with revenue increases through additional taxation, and it is unlikely that Obama has changed his interpretation of the term. Assuming a static economy, as Obama does, his new taxes will bring an additional $50 billion per year. Where will $50 billion in new taxes and $50 billion in spending cuts get us? From borrowing $1,640 billion per year (43% of the Federal budget, 11% of GDP) to borrowing only $1,540 billion per year (41% Fed, 10% GDP). Meanwhile, our economy will continue to fester, and then get worse, as inflation hits due to the massive borrowing. Obama's plan is a non-starter. The Republican plan of mild spending cuts is close to a non-starter.

We need a different approach. Government in 2001 was doing all right (balanced budget and all), so let us cut back programs and spending to 2001 levels, adjusted for inflation, while maintaining the Bush taxes. This constitutes a $1,000 billion spending cut, dropping our borrowing to a more manageable $640 billion per year (22.8% Fed, 4.6% GDP). Add on Obama's tax for high income earners, and we borrow only $590 billion per year (21.1% Fed, 4.2% GDP). This is a 20:1 ratio of cuts to revenues; still marginally insufficient, but nowhere near what is on the table.

What about a dynamic economy? If Obama's tax harms the GDP by 3%, which already seems to be happening, then Federal revenues may drop $65 billion, while Obama's tax only brings in $50 billion, for a dynamic loss of $15 billion, and Federal borrowing goes up to $655 billion (23.4% Fed, 4.8% GDP). If we include the increase in social services that a festering economy demands, the borrowing gets even worse. On the other hand, if that one Obama tax is lowered instead, and the GDP grows 3%, the Feds get an extra $65 billion, meaning we borrow $575 billion (20.5% Fed, 4.0% GDP).

The solution is clear; we need to cut spending a lot, to Clinton-Gingrich levels, and cut taxes a little, from Bush levels. The spending cuts will necessitate a decrease in government size and interference with our economy, which will help the GDP increase even faster. If local and state governments chip in to reduce government and taxes, we could be seeing a booming economy and budget surpluses in 4 or 5 years. There is plenty of room to cut government, even from 2001 levels.

Unfortunately, the path forward means a change in Democrats from political animals to reasonable beings. Many Democrats can potentially make this change, but President Obama is a strong and stubborn believer in big government. When big government failed in the 1980's, Obama had a "crisis of faith". Rather than use the opportunity to educate himself, Obama concluded that the Soviets just did something wrong, and he could do it right; "we are the ones we have been waiting for." But the mistake the Soviets made was big government, and it is the same mistake that Obama has been making. President Obama has promised to veto any bill that does not contain tax increases, and has balked at even moderate spending cuts, so what is he likely to do at the suggestion of small tax cuts and massive spending cuts?

There is only one path forward: Democrats must go against Obama to override his veto. All of the policies demanded in this article have been supported by Democrats before, in the 1980's and again in the 1990's, and 2000's, so Democrats can support them yet again. The problem lies the political cost of going against Obama. President Obama has been re-elected for his final term, by basically a 50/50 split, pushed over the top by "low information" voters (a la Derrick Smith, Jesse Jackson Jr., legalized pot). Consider which image will be worse; a marginalized radical in the White House, or a double-dip recession (or possibly even a collapsing nation)? You could even impeach the marginalized radical for his multiple scandals, install President Biden, blame the failures of the past four years on the radical and his corruption, fix the problems, and take credit, and save face. Maybe even install Mitt Romney as the new VP, a symbol that the country is healed. Obama becomes a bad memory, Joe Biden and Harry Reid become heroes (as disgusting as that sounds), and then comes President Hillary Clinton (which used to sound disgusting, but sounds a lot better than President Obama).

Democrats, do not fall for your own propaganda. Do not fall for Obama's propaganda. Do not misinterpret an election determined by "low information" voters (as most elections are, unfortunately). The nation cannot afford it, and neither can you, personally, or as a party.