Could this holiday season be even tenser than ObamaCare Christmas? Yes, it can.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner went to Capitol Hill yesterday with an administration package supposedly aimed at preventing us from going over the fiscal cliff. It was so extreme that Senator Mitch McConnell “burst into laughter.”
Indeed, it is very likely that the White House knows that this is an unserious offering and is expecting us to go over the fiscal cliff.Kimberley Strassel writes this morning in the Wall Street Journal:
Then again, the most frightening aspect of the White House proposal is that it wasn't an error. Perhaps the proposal was thoroughly calculated. This suggests a president who doesn't care about the outcome of the cliff negotiations—who thinks that he wins politically no matter what. He's betting that either the GOP will be far more responsible than he is and do anything to avert a crisis, or that the cliff gives him the tax hikes his partisans are demanding. Win-win, save for the enormous pain to average families across the country.
The Republicans will have to contemplate how to deal with such an unserious offer. But in presenting his demands, the president has now made very clear that there is only one side that is working in good faith.
Actually, I think the president is acting in good faith—it’s simply that his fidelity is to longer-range transformation, not necessarily saving us from the more immediate prospect of yet another financial meltdown. (To thoroughly ruin your Friday, don’t miss Charles Krauthammer’s “Cliff-jumping with Barack.”)
We’ve been living from crisis to crisis for years now, and there will be more of the same. So I think many of us go into yet another holiday season feeling vulnerable to the whims of our own elected officials (and this is before they overtly start trying to get their hands on our 401-K plans!).