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Go read the rest of this at TL in Exile. It's funny really, Boehner had all the tools in the world at his disposal and still got bested in this deal. Bear in mind what I said before though, Boehner was up against people who are very good at making shady deals seem legit. These are the very best (worst) of the crooked chicago political machine. What Boehner needs to understand is that you can't trust a fucking democrat, ever. They will smile at you while they stab you in the back.
I'm not giving Boehner a pass on this. He screwed the pooch, big time. He gave away everything and got nothing in return. He should have been able to see what the democrats were doing or have someone in his corner that could. He has lost my faith and I'm sure the faith of millions of other too.
He should have shouted from the highest mountain that obama was using our Troops as a bargaining tool. He should have held his ground, government shutdown or not. He should have forced the democrats to make real, substantial cuts. Even if the deal he was able to cut didn't pass the senate, the ball would have been in their court. The spotlight, and the blame, would have been on those that deserve it...
By T.L. Davis - TL in Exile
The other day I expressed my dissatisfaction with the budget deal. I quoted the oft-quoted numbers of $50 billion in new spending while negotiating for a $38.5 billion dollar spending reduction and intimated that this was clearly stupid. But, there were levels of being sold out that I had not addressed and since taking the victory lap along with Barack Obama was not enough for Boehner and people are considering him a winner in the negotiations with Obama, I think I ought to be a bit more clear as to my objections to the budget deal recently released.
First of all, you know when you have been bested when the opposition holds you up as a worthy adversary. I don't know for a fact that the collective ass-covering was a part of the negotiated deal to let Obama keep some of his most prized pieces of the budget, or not. It stinks, that's all I know. There was no defunding of Planned Parenthood, there was no defunding of Obamacare, there was no real 38.5 billion dollars in spending cuts, it was done with some accounting gimmicks. By the way, who has already forgotten that accounting gimmicks like keeping Social Security off budget and Medicare's "Doctor Fix" are how we got here in the first place? It is this kind of smarmy, weasel-y budget negotiations that have led to $14 trillion in debt with no end in sight. Even Paul Ryan's budget doesn't even balance the budget until 2021, so when the hell are we going to deal with the DEBT?
For those who don't know, deficits are what accrue every year, debt is the pile that all of these yearly deficits are piled onto. Deficits are the amount of money you are spending over what you are taking in, Debts are the things that catch all of those yearly excesses and pile them up. So, if we don't even get to a balanced budget until 2021, these trillion dollar deficits will continue during all that time and dump onto the massively growing DEBT. It is only in theory that we eventually, sometime in the mid century, actually begin to work on the DEBT, which by then will be somewhere near $30 trillion dollars or 200% of our GDP, assuming we ever get out of the ditch Barack Obama has driven us back into over his two years.
Okay, those are the raw numbers that must be placed alongside the puny $38.5 billion dollars supposedly saved in the budget deal, with the help of some left-over stimulus money and returned TARP funds, NOT mostly by cutting spending as they would have you believe.
