Ron Paul destroys Romney and Perry in straw poll victory. Follow

So let's get this straight. Obama is calling for a jobs bill, but Congress is unwilling to pass it. And Obama's response is to threaten a veto if Congress doesn't. So exactly what Deb said Paul would do.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/63756.html


The "Buffet Rule" should of passed a long time ago, but Obama never forced it. Now with his re-election up for grabs, he has no choice.

I get this response quite a lot from people. Can you elaborate further?

You say Ron Paul is insane as all the rest, but honest. I don't understand how following the Constitution of this country is insane. Is Ron Paul's threat to eliminate the Fed what you're talking about or something else?

Not that I'm throwing my support behind the plan, but it's not unusual for sales taxes to exempt things like food and prescription drugs from taxation (see page 4) as to lessen the blow on those with less income.

Edit: I don't know why I quoted the part I did... it's nap time apparently.


Edited, Sep 19th 2011 3:11pm by someproteinguy

So exactly the same thing?

isn't it obvious.

Deb's statement didn't specify *why* Congress might not pass a presidents bill, just that it wouldn't, and that a bad president would rather that nothing gets passed if his own bill wont. Which is precisely what Obama is doing right now.

Except that 1 specific facet (and it's really a set of things, but whatever) is the one thing that both sides disagree on. You get that what you're saying is somewhat irrelevant. Usually, the reason a bill fails to pass is because there's that "one thing" that one side insists must be in there and the other side insists must not. We can assume that the hypothetical bill which Paul would want would be rejected by congress because it contained one "facet" which congress refused to pass.

It's the same issue. Obama is in a position where public opinion is against what he wants, and a necessary part of congress is against what he wants. But he's making that one thing the key condition which must be met to get any bill passed. It's not just heavy handed, it's really stupid. Ok, to be fair, it's a gamble. But I think it's a gamble based on being so far inside a liberal echo chamber that he just doesn't realize how incredibly unpopular what he's demanding is. He's digging his own political grave here.

I am quite sure he said he would veto anything that cut from medicare/medicade, without a proportionate increase to revenues.

Doesn't get more single track then that.

Both cases assume the same base conditions. The president wants a bill with X in it. Congress doesn't want to pass a bill with X in it. President says he'll veto any bill without X in it.

How is this different? Obama is doing exactly what Deb said Paul would do. Only he's doing it right now, and not in some hypothetical future "this is what a crazy ideologue might do" scenario. And more amusingly, the thing he's chosen to draw a line in the sand over is tax increases. Not terribly popular.

And it's not going to be terribly popular with his own party either. His bluff only works as long as congress doesn't actually pass a deficit reduction bill without those tax increases in it. If they do, and he goes through with a veto, now *he's* the one saying "no" to fixing the economy. So he's relying on Senate Democrats to basically fall on their swords for him and take the pressure for not passing any bills the House puts out there that doesn't meet the presidents criteria. He's trying to take the credit for standing firm, but it's his party members in the Senate who will have to take the heat for it.


All the GOP has to do is keep passing bills in the house like they ones they have been passing. Send a mountain of them at the Senate. That effectively puts the "no on fixing the economy" label squarely on the Democrats. IMO, while Obama may get some legs out of this in the short term, he's taking a huge political gamble with this, and in all likelihood it'll turn into a massive political blunder for both him and his party. He's just made himself out to be the obstructionist in this debate.

Raising upper tier taxes to help close the deficit has pretty wide support. Or maybe the "far left liberal echo chamber" is bigger than you thought.

Only when linked in an "either/or" relationship with cutting medicare and social security benefits (which is presumably why Obama framed his words the way he did). The problem is that when you poll plans that don't cut those benefits for current recipients and compare them to raising taxes, raising taxes gets much less support.



The liberal echo chamber commissions push polls that frame the issues in exactly the way they want to maximize their apparent support. But those polls don't reflect the actual choices out there. None of the GOP proposals so far have included cuts to current recipients of Medicare or Social Security. So what we're left with really is Obama playing politics with a very real problem which needs a very real solution.


He's selling a "plan" that is just more empty rhetoric. He's going to reduce the deficit by $3T over ten years (never mind that deficits aren't really calculated that way), with $1.5T in tax increases on the rich and assuming $1.1T in saved spending from draw downs of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Um... So even if this plan is more than just vapor, how does he think this is "balanced"? So $2.6T comes in the form of tax increases and defense spending cuts and the other $400B comes from where? It's BS. He knows no one's going to take it seriously and it has no chance of going anywhere legislatively.

He's campaigning to his base. Frankly, I think that's a mistake, but at this point it's really all he has left.