Sen. McConnell’s contingency plan on the debt ceiling is to pay $2.5T to topple Obama. And if I were 100% SURE it would end IMPOTUS, I’d support it. But since there is no guarantee, it’s better to gird our loins and prepare to fight Obama with a no new taxes plan.
The bigger issue with McConnell is that he didn’t run his plan past the Tea Party, Boehner, and Cantor first. Since we run the House, that means the Senate should take its cues from our riotous freshmen, whether they like it or not.
Right now, Republican Senators are the weaker sex.
What is truly awesome is that there is an easy way for Rep. Cantor to prove his Tea Party bonafides and smack Obama right back after the challenge he received:
Yesterday, House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor used colored-coded spreadsheets to detail $2 trillion in spending cuts he asserts were agreed to by the Biden group. The President asked Cantor “if he wasn’t missing a page”, meaning the revenue aspect of the Biden talks. Cantor also proposed $350 billion in additional mandatory health care spending cuts. Obama pointed out that this $350 billion still isn’t enough to get the $2.4 trillion in savings necessary to solve the debt ceiling crisis through 2012.
OMB disputed Cantor’s numbers, citing, at most, only $1.7 trillion in potential spending cuts tentatively agreed to by the Biden group. By either side’s arithmetic, negotiators are left with a $400 – $700 billion gap – a huge amount by any standard.
Then, on July 13th, Obama sent Cantor back to the drawing board again, by actually walking out on the debt ceiling meeting.
Obama told Cantor that he would either have to agree to tax increases or give up on his demand that the debt hike be matched dollar-to-dollar to the cuts — that is, $2.5 trillion in deficit-reduction over 10 years in exchange for a $2.5 trillion hike in the debt ceiling.
He said that the negotiators should return to the White House Thursday to discuss savings from health care programs, budget caps and options for raising revenue.
Cantor needs to show up now with $700B in new savings taken directly out of the hides of Federal Employees.
That’s only $70B in cuts per year for ten years and simply treats public employees as they’d be treated in the private market.
The problem is that those kind of cuts would have a real effect on Cantor’s home state of Virginia. He’d be killing the fat pension plans for Federal Employees, making them all use an HMO, and basically gutting their union to the bone.
And if Eric Cantor wants to lead the Tea Party, that is exactly what he should do.
Now is not the time for making politically hard choices about Social Security and Medicare; now is the time for making the easiest one possible: KILL public employee unions and end their $ support of Democrats.
As I have been arguing since Big Gov’s beginning, the most obvious strategy to winning the future is to put 100% of the economic blame on public employees and refuse to discuss other major cuts to entitlements until Democrats have been choked off from Public Employee Union support.
When Obama throws Grandma under the bus, the GOP should throw DC under the bus and let voters choose.
Obama challenged Cantor to find the last $700B in cuts, and the best way to put the debate back on the Democrats is to make the next three weeks about Public Employees.
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