. . . why didn’t he submit legislation to the 111th Congress when the Democrats had a majority in the House and a super-duper majority in the Senate (filibuster-proof for six months)?

And why aren’t our friends in the legacy media asking him about this oversight?

Question came to mind as I was reading Rush’s response to Obama using Warren Buffet’s secretary as a prop:  ”There’s something inherently unfair about the Republican tax code, as though Warren Buffett’s secretary is eating pork and beans while sitting in the sewer grate, while her boss is flying around on his NetJets planes. And, lo and behold, she was up there!”  Read the whole thing.

Republican tax code?  Democrats had full power for two full years and didn’t try to reform it.  So, shouldn’t we be calling it a Democratic tax code?

FROM THE COMMENTS: chad writes:

Republicans need to do a better job explaining double-taxation with dividends and capital gains. The way it is now, people hear about how so-and-so made all this money and only paid 15% while some much poorer person paid 20% or more, never getting the explanation as to how this is an apples-to-oranges comparison so long as we have high corporate income taxes that take a huge cut of profits before they become dividends or capital gains.

Indeed.

Maybe it’s that they don’t want to grow up. From Yahoo!’s homepage today:

The real story though is that although they helped elect the incumbent, delivering two-thirds of their votes to Barack Obama, they’re the group suffering the most from his economic polices. Although that Democrat saw his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act sail through a Democratic Congress in 2009, that supposedly stimulative legislation has failed to generate the jobs he promised.

And now only “only 55 percent of young Americans have jobs, [the] lowest [figure] since WWII“:

Unemployment among young adults is at its highest point since World War II, new data show. And it’s having a disconcerting impact on the trajectory of their careers and lives.

“We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers,” Andrew Sum, an economist with the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University told the Associated Press.

Just 55.3 percent of people between 16 and 29 were employed in 2010 on average, the according to new figures released by the Census Bureau. That represents an enormous drop from 67.3 percent in 2000. Among teens the figure was less than 30 percent.

Emphasis added.

Nobel-prize winning economist Gary S. Becker had a piece in the Wall Street Journal on Friday which is perhaps the best short comprehensive piece on the ongoing economic malaise, from the causes of the financial crisis of 2008 to the failure of the immediate past Congress and current administration to remedy the situation.

The University of Chicago economics professor reminds his readers that “government behavior also contributed to and prolonged” the financial crisis: “Regulators who could have reined in banks instead became cheerleaders for the banks.”

Given that markets melted down in a Republican administration, Democrats cleaned up at all levels in the 2008 elections. Once in power, they turned to their party’s tried and true response to economic crises: more government spending. Congressional Democrats put together a near-trillion dollar “stimulus plan”, and “Leading government economists, backed up by essentially no evidence, argued that this spending would stimulate the economy by enough to reduce unemployment rates to under 8%.”

Although a lot of economic theory supports the notion that higher spending stimulates the economy, the historical record tells a different story.

Instead of economic expansion on par with previous economic recoveries with accelerating job creation and declining unemployment, the Democratic stimulus instead produced . . .

. . . a sizable expansion of the federal deficit and debt.

The misdiagnosis of widespread market failure led congressional leaders, after the 2008 election, to propose radical changes in financial institutions and, more generally, much wider regulation and government control of companies and consumer behavior. . . .

Although regulatory discretion failed leading up to the crisis, Congress nevertheless added to the number and diversity of federal regulations as well as to the discretion of regulators. (more…)

In today’s WSJ.com’s Political Diary (available by subscription), Stephen Moore quips “The Laffer report on the two presidents”, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama “is aptly entitled ‘The Odd Couple.’ In this case Reagan would be Felix, because he cleaned up the mess; and Mr. Obama is more like Oscar, who leaves a bigger mess behind.”

Seems Democrats believe the incumbent can repeat the feat of the most successful domestic policy president of the 20th century and win reelection despite middling polls during his third year in office. Problem is is that the Gipper’s poll numbers steadily increased in 1983 while in the corresponding year of his term, Obama’s have drifted downward.

Moore is onto something when he talks about Obama having left a bigger mess behind [than the one he "inherited"]. One reason House Republicans haven’t been able to devote more time on conservative reforms is that they have had to clean up messes the previous Congress left behind, such as its failure to pass a budget and to increase the debt ceiling high enough to accommodate the spending increases it did pass.

In addition to the messes the last Democratic House left the current Republican one, there are the messes Obama will leave to his successor, including notably two of the “big” pieces of legislation he signed, the health care overhaul and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, each increasing federal control over our economy. Not to mention all the new regulations administration appointees have foisted on the private sector, particularly those imposed by the EPA.

The next president is going to have to devote the better part of his first year in office just cleaning up the messes the incumbent is making today.

President Obama, I believe, made two crucial decisions, deciding perhaps (at least in the first case) by choosing not to decide that make his grandstanding on the tax issue little more than political demagoguery.  In the first case, he chose not to stand up to congressional Democrats when they presented him with their $800-billion dollar “stimulus.”   The second was when he agreed to extend the tax Bush tax cuts.

Now, wherever he goes, whatever he does, he talks about shared sacrifice and people paying their fair share, by which he means that he wants Congress to tax “millionaires and billionaires.”   Yet, if he thought we needed to raise more revenue from taxpayers, why then did he sign off on extending the tax cuts?  WIthout doing anything, they would have just lapsed and, presto chango, millionaires and billionaires (not to mention small business owners) would be sacrificing a little more to Uncle Sam.

And today the president and the various left-of-center pundits are lecturing Republicans for rejecting tax increases altogether.  Yeah, but Republicans didn’t support the Democrats’ supposedly stimulative spending spree which the president pushed without providing a means to pay for it.  And now the president’s supporters are demanding Republicans support tax increases to pay for that ill-advised piece of profligacy.  And pay the political price for it as well.

The primary reason Republicans are focusing on spending cuts is because the Democrats have ratcheted spending up to levels so high that George W. Bush looks stingy by contrast.  Many of us who would be happy just getting spending down to Clinton-era levels.

On Tuesday, I linked the closing question of Stephen Green’s insightful post on the Obama administration, but the beginning of that post also merits your attention (as does the middle).  He used Steve McCann’ thoughtful piece at American Thinker, linking the president’s behavior in the debt ceiling debate to his overall failure of leadership, as his jumping-off point.

McCann contends that

Barack Obama’s only interest in the debt ceiling debate was to raise the borrowing limit sufficiently to get by the next election, and as a cudgel to denigrate the Republicans. His concern was not for the American people and the impact of overwhelming national debt, nor an impending and inevitable credit downgrade. Rather, he was determined that raising the debt ceiling would not become an issue during the presidential campaign. . . .

The destruction wrought by the nearly $5.5 Trillion (more than a third of the total debt of a nation 222 years old) he will have added to the nation’s balance sheet by the end of his term was immaterial, thus no detailed plan was forthcoming from the White House, and no lie or accusation aimed at the opposition was too absurd to tell.

The Democrat has, McCann observes, “abdicated all responsibility to the Congress, in particular the House of Representatives, which has little choice but to assume a role they are not structured to do: lead the country as best they can until November 2012.”  Indeed, Obama been doing that since the dawn of his administration where he let congressional Democrats draft the “stimulus” as they would later write the health care overhaul.

Seems the election of a Republican House threw a wrench into his plans of governance.   (more…)

Just caught this on Instapundit:

WHO OWNS THE DEBT-CEILING ISSUE AGAIN? “Of the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling we have now, $4.5 trillion got added by Democrat-controlled Congresses since taking control in 2007. That corresponds exactly with the expansion in spending by Democratic Congresses over the same period.”

December the 7th may be the day that lives infamy, but December the 6th marks the day President Obama lost the debate on taxation.  On that day last year, as Washington Post writers Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray put it, the Democrat “and congressional Republicans . . . reached a tentative accord on a far-reaching economic package that would preserve George W. Bush administration tax breaks for families at all income levels for two years”.

To return tax rates to their level before the Texas Republican took office, all Obama had to do was, well, nothing.  The tax rates set early in Mr. Bush’s term would have expired on their own.

In working out this compromise, then signing the bill, the president essentially conceded the argument on taxes.  And yet now it appears the agreement he had worked out with congressional leaders fell apart because Speaker Boehner wouldn’t accede to his demand for “additional revenues” (AKA more taxes).

If the president so wanted additional revenue, why then didn’t he just sit back last December and let the Bush tax rates lapse?

Glenn Reynolds notes how convenient it is that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner [says the] Debt-Ceiling Must Be Settled Until After 2012 Election. He wants Congress to “take default off the table for the next 18 months … through the election.”

Might have been more convenient for Democrats to settle it before the 2010 elections when they had the votes to do so, considering, that is, how they used those votes to increase the debt as an astronomical pace.

From January 20, 2009 until January 3, 2011, a period of more than 700 days, Democrats controlled the White House and held overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress.  And for the past six months, with increasing vitriol and ever elevated volume, they have been criticizing Republicans for their attempts to finish the work Democrats left undone, like not passing a budget for FY 2011.

If the president thought raising the debt ceiling was so important, why then didn’t he schedule a vote to do so when his party controlled Congress?  Obama, John Hinderaker writes,

. . . is now fixated on the “deadline” of August 2, 2011, but where was he in 2009? Or 2010? Or prior to last week? It has been over two years since the federal government has had a budget. For Obama to adopt a sanctimonious “eat your peas” approach to the federal budget is so disingenuous that it is not surprising that Republicans find him infuriating to negotiate with.

When Democrats were in power, they ran up the tab, acting as if they would never be no consequences to their spendthrift policies.  And now they’ve left the Republicans to clean up the mess they left behind and is now faulting them for not doing it the way the Democrats (claim they) would have done it when they had the chance.  They had the chance but didn’t take it.

Instead of criticizing the Republicans, why doesn’t the president’s party acknowledge its own responsibility for the current impasse?

Three days ago, Ed Morrissey joined Time’s Jay Newton-Small in asking if the House Speaker responsible for the greatest accumulation of debt in U.S. History had been marginalized:

Despite losing the midterm elections on the issue of spending and deficits, Pelosi wondered aloud in a White House strategy meeting why debt-ceiling negotiations had to involve spending cuts at all, surprising everyone else in the room . . . .

As the leader of a House caucus in a clear minority, Pelosi has already become largely irrelevant, especially after losing the midterms in such spectacular fashion.  Now Newton-Small says that Barack Obama might make her even more obsolete by directly dealing with her lieutenant, Steny Hoyer, to get the moderate Democrats on board any deal . . .

Do wonder if Mrs. Pelosi has taken a gander at the figures and charts showing an explosion in deficit spending under her watch.  The resourceful Jim Hoft has the charts, one of which I reproduce to show that the deficit decreasing under the Republican Congresses of the middle George W. Bush years, skyrocketed when Mrs. Pelosi took the gavel in the House of Representatives in 2007:

The arrow points to the deficit of the first budget passed by a House helmed by the San Francisco Democrat.

Has she been that removed from the politics of the last two-and-and-half years to remain so clueless about growing public concerns about excessive government spending?

“It is hard,” the president said in his press conference today, “to persuade people to do hard stuff that includes trimming benefits and increasing revenues. . . . Reason we have a problem now is people keep avoiding hard things.”  (Via Gateway Pundit.)

• Pass a federal budget.  The Senate, run by Democrats has not done so in over 800 days.
• Presenting a federal budget that can muster at least one vote in the United States Senate.  No Senators voted for the only detailed budget the president has released this year.
• Presented a plan to ensure Medicare’s solvency.  (If you look “at the numbers,” the president said today, “Medicare in particular will run out of money, and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up. I mean, it’s not an option for us to just sit by and do nothing.”  (Via Jennifer Rubin.))  Neither President Obama nor the Democratic leadership of either House has presented such a plan.

Do hope that those in the MSM practicing “accountability journalism” will be asking Democrats about their plans to undertake these “hard” tasks.

Welcome Instapundit Readers!!

Back in the George W. Bush era, Barney Frank, either in his role as a senior member or Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was one of the Congress’s biggest cheerleaders for Fannie Mae, the Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) at the heart of the financial meltdown of 2008.  The Massachusetts Democrat repeatedly opposed Republican proposals for greater oversight of the GSEs, famously saying in 2003, “I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision]. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing. . . .“

In 2008, we learned that Mr. Frank had a conflict of interest:

While Frank served on the House Banking Committee in the 1990s [as what is now the Financial Services was then called], his partner, Herb Moses, worked at Fannie Mae as assistant director of product initiatives from 1991 to 1998. The two lived together at that time, breaking up in 1998, “a few months after Moses ended his seven-year tenure at Fannie Mae.”

I later wrote my Congressman asking Henry Waxman to refer this matter to the House Ethics Committee.  Today, we learn that Mr. Frank’s conflict of interest was far greater than we had initially reported.  In the Boston Herald, Howie Carr reports that in a new book, Reckless Endangerment, New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson reveals that Barney got his partner a job:

“Frank actually called up the company (Fannie Mae) and asked them to hire his companion, who had just gotten an MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business (at Dartmouth). . . . Of course the company was happy to provide a job for his companion and rolled out the red carpet in a series of interviews with a variety of executives, and it ultimately did hire the man.”

Wonder how the media would react if a journalist reported that a Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee got her husband a job at the Pentagon. (more…)

In a post on Pajamas Media’s main page in October 2008, Tom Blumer provided a chart which helps us understand why we’re in the fiscal situation we are today:

Federal outlays already increasing at a rapid pace with Republican Congresses increased at an even more rapid pace when Nancy Pelosi took over as House Speaker and Harry Reid, thanks to a new crop of Democratic Senators, elected with the help of then-chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Charles Schumer, became Senate majority leader.

Now that very same Mr. Schumer is whining that conservatives are to blame for an imminent government shutdown:

“What we have here is a flea, wagging a tail, wagging a dog,” said Schumer, chairman of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

“The flea are the minority of House Republicans who are hard right, the tail is the House Republican caucus, and the dog is the government,” Schumer explained. “That flea is influencing what the dog does … and it is sad.”

Schumer for more than a week has been arguing that Tea Party conservatives will be to blame if there is a shutdown.

(Via Ann Althouse.)  Sorry, Charlie, the reason Tea Party conservatives have such clout is because their outrage at the increasing size of the federal government has resonated with the American people, leading to the election of Republican legislators (and at least one Senate Democrat) who want to hold the line on spending.

If Americans had the facts, they won’t blame House Speaker John Boehner, but instead hold Democrats to account for the shutdown.  Nick Gillespie reminds us why Congress is still voting on their FY2011 budget — six full months after that fiscal year began:  Democrats “utterly failed to pass a fricking budget last year even though they controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.”  (Via Instapundit.) (more…)

Earlier today, Jim Geraghty reported that yesterday the president said “the need for a budget deal to avoid a” government shutdown, “We are prepared to put whatever resources are required in terms of time and energy to get this done. But that’s what the American people expect.”

So, one wonders why the Democrat skipped town this morning to discuss “green energy” in Philadelphia and “deliver remarks at the National Action Network’s Keepers of the Dream Awards Gala, hosted by Reverend Al Sharpton and the National Action Network” in New York.  Not quite sure how attending those events will give him the opportunity to devote those resources to hammering out a budget agreement with congressional leaders.

We may see a partial government shutdown if the president and Congress do not agree on a plan because, as Mark Tapscott put it, “under the previous Democratic majority when for the first time ever, House leaders decided not to follow the law and enact a 2011 budget.”  Tapscott then provides a timeline provided by Don Seymour, a senior aide to House Speaker John Boehner on the failure of the 111th Congress (AKA the Pelosi-Reid Congress) to pass a budget.

The president has asked Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “to join him at the White House for an evening meeting.”  He could have accomplished a lot more if he spent the day in Washington trying to forge an agreement.  Or, if he spent more time than just “three minutes” on the phone with the Speaker.

At least Boehner has a plan, announcing today that House Republicans will vote tomorrow “on a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running for another week while cutting $12 billion from the budget“.  If the Senate fails to act and if we do see a government shutdown, the blame will not lie with the Republican House, but with the president for not staying in Washington to work out a deal and with former Speaker Pelosi and Reid for failing to pass a budget in the last Congress, as the law required. (more…)

While we here in Los Angeles are focused on the downpour and our news media on the attacks on Libya, we still need bear in mind that the current divided Congress has yet to finish the work the 111th (i.e., the Pelosi-Reid Congress) left undone.  They still haven’t passed a 2012 budget.

You see, the Democratic Senate has rejected the budget the Republican House has passed.

As we think about matters budgetary, a thought occurs.

Recall how many Democrats (and their allies in the media and in the blogosphere) criticized the immediate past president for his failure to hold the line on spending.  But, wouldn’t these folks have cried bloody murder had that good man tried to make the type of cuts passed by the Republican House.  I mean, heck, the Washington Post characterized ”the $6 billion cut in the most recent continuing resolution as ‘slashing’ the federal budget“.

Wonder what kind of cuts these folks proposed.

Ed Morrissey explains:

If you had to pick the poster child for budgetary irresponsibility over the last few years — and certainly for 2010 — it would have to be former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  Not only did Democrats under her Speakership raise discretionary spending 18% in three years, not only did she pass a Pay-Go law and then fail to adhere to it even once, Pelosi became the first Speaker since Watergate to fail to pass a budget resolution for a fiscal year.  In 2010, despite having a 77-seat majority in the House, a Senate which her party held by 18 seats, and a Democrat in the White House, Pelosi failed — or refused — to pass a budget for FY2011.  Instead, she pushed continuing resolutions in order to hide spending until after the midterms, and failed even then to pass a budget.

Read the whole thing.  (Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE:  Wonder how often our media remind us that it was the failure of Mrs. Pelosi’s (and Mr. Reid’s) 111th Congress that has forced the 112th to pass continual continuing resolutions.

UP-UPDATE:  Jim Hoft reminds us of some facts:

When Speaker Pelosi took over Congress the national deficit was $162 billion. When she exited in January 2011 it was at $1.29 Trillion dollars. Pelosi and Barack Obama even managed to triple the national deficit in his first year after the stimulus passed.

“House Republicans,” Kara Rowland writes in the Washington Times, writes, “this weekend approved a funding bill that cuts 2011 spending levels by $61 billion compared with 2010, but the measure now goes to the Senate, where majority Democrats oppose it.”  Actually, I quibble with the word to which I added emphasis in that sentence.  While Republicans voted the bill out of the House, it’s won’t be going to the Senate right away.  You see, according to the Senate’s web-page, the Senate will be out of session next week.

So, that doesn’t give the Democratic-controlled chamber much time to consider the funding bill and work out compromise legislation with the House before the continuing resolution funding the federal government expires the following week, on March 4 to be precise.  The reason we need such a resolution is that last year when Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress, they failed to pass a budget for the 2011 Fiscal Year (which began last October 1).

Too busy were Democrats with the big ticket items on their party’s agenda, that they neglected one of the legislature’s fundamental responsibilities, passing a budget.  So, without a budget, both Houses need to agree to a “short-term spending resolution to keep the government running” after March 4.  Without this resolution, the government shuts down.

Now, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, as I reported on Friday, is laying the groundwork to blame Republicans for such a shutdown.  But, if it weren’t  for her failure last year when she was House Speaker to pass a budget, Congress wouldn’t this month be considering a continuing resolution.  Her successor John Boehner has had to finish up the work she and her fellow Democrats left undone.  And if Mrs. Pelosi’s Senate counterparts were committed to avoiding a government shutdown, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would call his chamber into session.

The shutdown, Rovin writes in Hot Air’s Green Room, “will be the Democrat’s fault plain and simple.” (more…)

The New York Times offers another reason Obamacare is bad for America:

The Obama administration is examining whether the new health care law can be used to require insurance plans to offer contraceptives and other family planning services to women free of charge.

This requirement grow out of an amendment slipped into the legislation “by Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, requiring officials to pay special attention to the ‘unique health needs of women.’”  But, the real issue is not the merits (or demerits) of offering contraceptive care, but the requirement that insurance plans offer them.

Shouldn’t private companies be allowed the freedom to decide which benefits they offer while consumers choose the policies which offers the benefits they seek?  But, not under the regime created by Obamacare.  If a company doesn’t want to offer contraception, well, too bad, the government will be taking their freedom away.

Under the plan, the administration is examining, the federal government could thus require Catholics (and others who oppose contraception on religious grounds) to offer plans which pay for services they oppose on moral grounds, causing many to drop health care coverage altogether.

If private insurers (and by extension private employers buying policies from said insurers) want to cover contraception, that should be their choice, but the state should not require them to do so.  And now, the Obama administration is weighing regulations making that choice for them (and depriving others of the choice not to cover contraception).

Another reason to repeal this statist legislation speedily.

The more the public learns about the bill Democrats passed last March, the less we like what’s in it.

NB:  Tweaked the post to improve the flow and clarify a point.

Well, fewer Democrats voted for repeal than I had anticipated.    Gotta give the unpopular Minority Leader credit for holding her caucus together.  Still, the Republican leadership did a lot better holding their caucus together for the repeal vote than their Democratic counterparts did with their caucus in the previous Congress:  all 242 Republicans backed repeal:

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said the healthcare law on the books would increase spending, raise taxes and eliminate jobs.

“Repeal means paving the way for better solutions that will lower the costs without destroying jobs or bankrupting our government,” Boehner said in remarks on the floor before the vote.

“Let’s stop payment on this check before it can destroy more jobs or put us into a deeper hole.”

The vote to roll back the president’s signature domestic achievement of the 111th Congress just 10 months after its passage underscores the deep divisions that still surround the new law. But whether House action will signal the beginning of a rapid dismantling of the healthcare overhaul or serve merely as a historical footnote remains to be seen.