Medicare Insider

Written By : Warner Todd Huston

Republican Senator Tom Coburn has just completed his transformation into a laughing stock. In an interview with the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, Coburn claimed that he fully believes that President Obama will become an “entitlement reformer” in his second term.

At the end of Klein’s first part of the interview he asks Coburn if Republicans will do any better to “compromise” with Obama if Obama wins a second term. Here is Coburn’s absurd reply:

We’ve had conversations where he’s told me he’ll go much further than anyone believes he’ll go to solve the entitlement problem if he can get the compromise. And I believe him. I believe he would.

This is the single dumbest thing I’ve ever seen a Republican say. The naivete and stupidity of this naïf is the most gobsmackingly stupid I’ve ever seen.

Obama a “reformer”? If Coburn really does believe this he reveals a startling lack of good sense. Obama has made an entire career out of gladhanding his opponents and in private one-on-one talks telling them exactly what they want to hear. He is soothing, assuring, even tempered. And he always, always lies through his teeth.

Even when he was in the Illinois Senate he did this. He’d seems so reasonable and good natured in his interactions. He always seemed to be willing to compromise. And in every vote he’d vote the hard-line, left-wing way.

Obama is not a compromiser but he is a hard-line leftist, a big government guy. The thought that he’ll do anything to reform entitlements, the supporting pillar of the Democrat Party, is absurd. If anything he’ll look to keep the status quo, but he is more likely to want to enlarge such programs.

Further, President Obama has shown not a single sign that he’s interested in any actual reform of practically anything much less entitlements. He’s a government hog, not a reformer.

Lastly, you must realize that once re-elected, Obama will have even less reason to compromise with Republicans. He’ll be wholly unbounded by the need to cater to voters and will use his second term for “legacy” issues, items that he wants to push forward at all costs – costs that won’t include worrying about voters.

That Coburn “believes” in Obama calls the Senator’s intelligence, maybe even his sanity, seriously into question.

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Article source: http://rightwingnews.com/democrats/foolish-naivete-sen-coburn-believes-obama-will-become-entitlement-reformer-in-2nd-term/

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He’s the biggest sensation in the U.K. since Susan Boyle. He trounced the competition in winning the big prize on “Britain’s Got Talent.” And he accepted his $500,000 pound award – on all fours!

Meet Pudsey, the border collie, bichon frise and Chinese crested cross mix – aka “mutt” – who wowed the judges and took Britain by storm with an amazing display of walking on his hind legs, jumping through hoops and even dancing the Charleston.

That’s the difference between a dog and House Republicans. You can teach a dog tricks. Apparently, you can’t teach a House Republican anything. They just can’t seem to learn.

We discovered this with Paul Ryan’s budget, for example. Last year, all but four House Republicans voted for the Ryan plan to end Medicare and Medicaid as they now exist and slash programs for the poor, while expanding tax cuts for the rich. His plan never got off the ground, but it still turned out to be a political disaster.

Newt Gingrich dismissed it as “right-wing social engineering.” And, once back home in their districts, Republicans were so clobbered by outraged constituents anxious about losing Medicare and Medicaid that they returned to Washington and practically disowned the Ryan plan. You’d think they’d have learned their lesson. But oh, no. This year Republicans turned around and adopted almost the very same plan, only worse. And Mitt Romney immediately praised the Ryan budget as a “bold step toward putting our nation back on the track to fiscal sanity.” He even called it “marvelous.”

And now, led by Speaker John Boehner, Republicans are displaying the same ignorance – and arrogance – on the debt ceiling. Who can forget last year’s debacle? Even though raising the debt ceiling so the United States can pay its bills was never before a partisan issue – Ronald Reagan did it 18 times; George W. Bush, seven times – House Republicans refused to allow another increase without corresponding spending cuts to domestic programs.

Join WND’s Joseph Farah in holding GOP members of Congress accountable. Demand that the federal government stop borrowing – No More Red Ink!

For Republicans, this proved to be another public-relations disaster. Experts predicted economic collapse. Credit agencies warned the United States would lose its top rating. The markets tanked. Crisis was only avoided when both sides agreed to the creation of a super committee. But that failed, too, when Republicans on the committee refused to accept any increase in revenues. At which point, as agreed, the “sequester” kicked in, requiring $1.2 trillion in cuts split evenly between defense and domestic programs. But now Republicans are trying to break that deal, too, by sparing the Pentagon and taking all cuts out of Head Start, food stamps and health care.

Once again, following such abject failure, you’d think Republicans would have learned something. But, oh no. Speaker Boehner is now throwing the same temper tantrum. This week, he told the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s 2012 Fiscal Summit: “When the time comes, I will again insist on my simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limit increase.” In other words, Boehner is re-opening the debt brawl of last summer by threatening to shut down the government and hold the full faith and credit of the United States hostage to drastic new domestic (only) spending cuts – and, of course, another extension of the Bush tax cuts.

No matter how he tries to wrap it in fiscally responsible rhetoric, Boehner’s suddenly rigid stand on the deficit is nothing but pure politics. If not, why did the current four Republican leaders – John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl – combine to vote for increases in the debt ceiling, with no strings attached, 19 times under President George W. Bush? Did they suddenly get religion when Barack Obama was elected? And, if it’s so sacrosanct, why does the Ryan budget itself include an increase of $5 trillion in the debt ceiling with no necessary corresponding cuts?

Clearly, Boehner’s just playing a political game with the debt ceiling. But it’s a dangerous game whose failure would have a devastating effect on the U.S. economy. Every government agency, every business, every family would face a much higher cost of borrowing. Thousands of businesses would fail, and unemployment would rise dramatically.

It’s irresponsible for Boehner to re-ignite last summer’s budget brawl. And political suicide. According to Gallup, after last year’s pitiful performance, Congress’ approval rating sank to a low of 10 percent. This year, Boehner seems determined to get it down to zero.

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Article source: http://mobile.wnd.com/2012/05/didnt-boehner-learn-anything-in-2011/

For another, it’s Boehner’s only option in 2012. The Democrats, for once, have nothing but fiscal leverage. They’ve got the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, which all Republicans would hate and many Democrats would welcome. They’ve got the aforementioned spending trigger, which Republicans really have begun to fear for its cuts to defense spending. They can do nothing — or, more likely, offer Republicans a deal they can’t accept — and the resulting paralysis will swing fiscal policy far, far, far to the left. Threatening to default on the national debt is Boehner’s only piece of counter-leverage.

So of course Boehner will try and use the debt ceiling as leverage again. And again. And again. It’s pretty clear that, at this point, there’s no going back to the time when debt-ceiling increases came smoothly. If I were the market, I’d take the fact that the leader of one of the two parties has publicly said that he “welcomes” debt-ceiling showdowns as evidence that the United States is almost certain to default on its debt — if only temporarily — within the next decade or so.

The question is what, aside from complain, Democrats and the business community will do to stop him. Somehow, the debt ceiling needs to be taken off the table once and for all… (Bill Clinton, for instance, argued that Obama should invoke the Fourteenth Amendment — which says “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned” — to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally).

Ezra Klein continues in a later post, Boehner’s debt ceiling crisis would be so much worse than you think:

There’s some chance that House Speaker John Boehner’s threat to provoke another debt-ceiling crisis doesn’t much matter. If it does matter, it’s only because fiscal policy has already gone very, very wrong.

As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday, “we’re likely to hit the debt limit sometime before the end of the year, but Congress has given the executive branch a set of tools that buy them some time. And those tools will probably take us into the early part of 2013, thus separating somewhat the timing of the expiry of the tax cuts and the sequester with the ultimate need for Congress to act on the debt limit.”

In other words, the Bush tax cuts expire on Dec. 31. The automatic spending cuts begin on Dec. 31. The debt ceiling likely won’t come due till February, or perhaps even March. So the scenario in which we reach a debt ceiling showdown is a scenario in which the two parties have already failed to come to an agreement on spending and taxes.

That is to say, it’s a scenario in which we’ve already reached the fiscal cliff and fallen over the edge. It’s a scenario in which the Bush tax cuts have probably expired, and the spending cuts have probably begun. It’s a scenario in which the markets are already in some amount of turmoil, and the forecasters are already sharply warning that Congress is dragging the country into a double-dip recession. It’s a scenario in which the two parties are already under tremendous pressure, in which Washington has been in some sort of semi-crisis for months, and in which all the possible deals have already been tried and failed. (It’s also a scenario, incidentally, in which our projected deficits are much lower, because our expected tax revenues are so much higher.)

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That’s not a scenario that looks like August 2011, when the debt ceiling was the only thing on the docket. It’s an economic crisis that looks more like September 2008, when Lehman was collapsing. And in that world, it’s so hard to predict the resulting financial chaos, public outrage, interest group pressure, and political terror that it’s almost impossible to say anything about how the crisis would be resolved, or who might benefit.

Article source: http://www.blogforarizona.com/blog/2012/05/the-tanman-weeper-of-the-house-john-boehner-threatens-to-take-america-hostage-again.html