President Obama is a man who doesn’t compromise, though sometimes he poses as a man who is tossing the GOP a bone. This gives him an opportunity to repeat how recalcitrant the GOP is.
But the president always keeps his eyes on the prize: squeezing more money out of thee and me.
You’ve probably heard about his latest offer of a “grand bargain” to the GOP that would supposedly allow a reduction in corporate taxes in exchange for more spending, or “investments,” as the president calls spending.
Wire service reporters act to some extent like stenographers, merely taking down what is said. So this report from Reuters gives you POTUS’s presentation of his grand bargain, so called:
President Barack Obama proposed a "grand bargain for middle-class jobs" on Tuesday that would cut the U.S. corporate tax rate and use billions of dollars in revenues generated by a business tax overhaul to fund projects aimed at creating jobs.
The goal, as outlined in his speech to an enthusiastic audience at an Amazon.com Inc facility in southeastern Tennessee, was to break through partisan gridlock in Congress with a formula that satisfies Republicans and Democrats alike.
The Wall Street’s Journal’s editorial board has more leeway to analyze the president’s remarks.
In an editorial headlined “Obama’s ‘Grand Bargain’ with Obama,” the editors write:
In Chattanooga on Tuesday, the latest stop on his economic inequality tour, President Obama made himself an offer he couldn't refuse. If Congressional Republicans agree to a corporate tax increase, he said, then he'll agree to spend more money on his favorite public-works projects. If Republicans bargain hard, will he also offer an expansion of ObamaCare as a sweetener?
We know this sounds like an exaggeration, but that's the essence of what the President proposed as what he called a new "grand bargain." Mr. Obama will agree to reform the corporate tax code—a GOP priority and one even the President claims to support—but only if the reform raises more revenue and only if he is allowed to spend that windfall on his priorities.
A White House press release clarified that the President would also like to raise taxes on individuals, not just businesses, while allowing federal spending to rise still higher. But showing they retain a sense of humor in the West Wing, the press release suggests that the President is willing to forgo this tax increase for now because he wants to "work with Republicans."
Yes, the grand bargain is just another way to suck more money from us. It is, in fact, designed to take more money from the middle class, whom the president professes to regard as his own pet class.
The Wall Street Journal editors contend that the president’s “grand bargain” proposal isn’t serious and that he knows it. This is just the latest instance of Washington gamesmanship.
The president is offering a compromise plan that, the Journal wryly comments, will “appeal to the ideological spectrum running from Elizabeth Warren to Chuck Schumer.” When the GOP rejects it, the president will call them obstructionist.
Meanwhile, Democrat Max Baucus and Republican Dave Camp have been holding hearings for years on ways to reform the tax code. If the president were serious, he might ask them to help. But there is a rub: as the Journal editors point out, Baucus and Camp plan to use the money gained by closing tax loopholes to lower taxes.