The Fox and the Hen House

Today when I saw that BO is staging a "Summit" to come up with a plan to achieve fiscal responsibility, I spewed a mouthful of scalding coffee all over my computer terminal.

After all, this is the guy who, just last week, promoted and then signed Nancy Pelosi's massive pork bill spending money we don't have on things we don't need. And this week he is concerned about fiscal responsibility? His claim that we are going to "Pay as we go" was pretty much blown last week.

His game plan is to bring in 75 "experts", primarily Democrat special interest groups and left-wing think tanks, put them in a room, send them off in groups with the assignment of devising a plan to cut the deficit in half in four years. I'm not sure if the baseline for that halving was last year's $450 billion deficit or this year's trillion dollar deficit (and counting).

It all sounded pretty ludicrous until I stopped and pondered exactly what BO is trying to accomplish. You see, when I think about fiscal responsibility, it means that you control spending to live within your means. This is what fiscal responsibility means to conservatives, and it is how most real people must live their lives. We can't spend more than we bring in year after year, or eventually we end up in a lot of trouble. So if we have a deficit, the problem is that we are spending too much money, and the solution is to spend less.

But BO's spending frenzy proves that controlling spending is not what he has in mind here. Liberals have a whole different way of looking at things. If the government is running a deficit, it means that they are not taxing us enough, and the solution is to raise taxes. The idea of reducing spending to balance the budget is heresy to a liberal, whose personal empowerment comes from his ability to take our money and dole it out to those who will ensure that he remains in power.

So the purpose of this contrived political theater is to make an excuse for BO's plan to raise taxes much higher and more broadly than he told us in the campaign. The conclusion that this anti-capitalist crowd of union bosses, environmental wackos, community organizers, gay rights activists, ACORN nuts, left-wing professors, liberal politicians, and fringe think tanks reaches will surely not be that we need to reduce government spending. They will conclude that the only course of action is to raise taxes. And who is the President to disagree. He'll go along with their recommendations. After all, that's what the experts said to do.