A popular column by Mark Steyn on National Review.
Excerpt:
In government, being merely a quarter-century obsolete would be a major achievement. The ruling party in Washington is wedded to the principle that an 80-year-old social program is inviolable: That’s like Blockbuster insisting in 2011 that there’s no problem with its business model for rentals of silent movies with live orchestral accompaniment. To be sure, there are some problems parking the musicians’ bus in residential streets, but nothing that can’t be worked out.
But “political reality” operates to different rules from humdrum real reality. Thus, the “debt ceiling” debate is regarded by most Democrats and a fair few Republicans as some sort of ghastly social faux pas by boorish conservatives: Why, everyone knows ye olde debt-limit vote is merely a bit of traditional ceremonial, like the Lord Chancellor walking backwards with the Cap of Maintenance and Black Rod shouting “Hats off, strangers!” at Britain’s Opening of Parliament. You hit the debt ceiling, you jack it up a couple trillion, and life goes on — or so it did until these GOP yahoos came along and decided to treat the vote as if it actually meant something.
Obama has done his best to pretend to take them seriously. He claimed to have a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan. The court eunuchs of the press corps were impressed, and went off to file pieces hailing the president as “the grown-up in the room.” There is, in fact, no plan. No plan at all. No plan whatsoever, either for a deficit reduction of $4 trillion or $4.73. As is the way in Washington, merely announcing that he had a plan absolved him of the need to have one. So the president’s staff got out the extra-wide teleprompter and wrote a really large number on it, and simply by reading out the really large number the president was deemed to have produced a serious blueprint for trillions of dollars in savings. For his next trick, he’ll walk out on to the stage of Carnegie Hall, announce that he’s going to play Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 2, and, even though there’s no cello in sight and Obama immediately climbs back in his golf cart to head for the links, music critics will hail it as one of the most moving performances they’ve ever heard.
The only “plan” Barack Obama has put on paper is his February budget. Were there trillions and trillions of savings in that? Er, no. It increased spending and doubled the federal debt.
How about Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader? Has he got a plan? No. The Democrat Senate has shown no interest in producing a budget for two-and-a-half years. Unlike the president, Senator Reid can’t even be bothered pretending he’s interested in spending reductions. But he is interested in spending, and, if that’s your bag, boring things like budgets only get in the way.
It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the president is willing to cut. You begin to see why the Europeans are a little miffed. They’re passing austerity budgets so austere they’ve spawned an instant anti-austerity movement rioting in the street — and yet they’re still getting downgraded by the ratings agencies. In Washington, by contrast, the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more — and nobody’s downgrading them.
Charles Krauthammer proposes a short-term solution that will put the blame squarely on Obama in this article on National Review. I am expecting the Republicans to follow this plan – we should see it coming out this week,
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Apart from understanding that Obama has no plan to reduce the debt, conservatives must also realize Obama does not consider the debt as a crisis. In fact he see it as the solution to the crisis caused by the Clinton administration, when sub-prime mortgages were given out to ensure the right of housing for the poor. Of course Obama doesn’t acknowledge that crisis either and instead blames the Bush administration for overspending on the war in Iraq, overlooking completely the amount of revenue created by the war, which stalled the effects of the Clinton era for a good seven years.
But don’t take my word for it. The United States Senate issuing the Levin–Coburn Report found “that the crisis was not a natural disaster, but the result of high risk, complex financial products; undisclosed conflicts of interest; and the failure of regulators, the credit rating agencies, and the market itself to rein in the excesses of Wall Street.
So how did this come about and what was the motivation. Well the Motivation was the leftist ever-present need to create new ways to ‘help’ the poor. The way was the Community Reinvestment Act that had been introduced by Gail Cincotta in 1977. In 1992 legislative changes were made. Wikepedia descibes them as follows: “Although minor amendments were made directly to the Community Reinvestment Act concerning the consideration of minority and female owned institutions & partnerships during evaluations first established in 1991, other portions of the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992 indirectly affected the CRA practices at the time in requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government sponsored enterprises that purchase and securitize mortgages, to devote a percentage of their lending to support affordable housing.”
In July of 1993 Clinton called for a reform of the CRA which Robert Rubin (Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, under President Clinton) stated was in line with President Clinton’s strategy to “deal with the problems of the inner city and distressed rural communities”.
Obviously the Secretary of the Treasury objected at the time, arguing that the criteria that should be used for mortgages should be whether one can pay or not, not where one lives.
Today we are still feeling the repercussions from the Global Financial Crisis that ensued, but our Commander In Chief would rather point fingers than educate himself on the causes. He can’t solve the debt crisis, because he dosen’t acknowledge that it exists, in his mind debt is untapped government revenue and as such he has no intention of reducing it. Whereas the Clinton administration was driving only the poorest Americans into irreversible debt, the Obama administration is driving all Americans over the edge.
LikeLike