2 Comments

Pete Spiliakos
March 5th, 2013 | 9:00 pm

The Republicans actually seem to be doing okay out of the sequester thing so far (in the sense that the median American isn’t out baying for their political blood.) We’ll see how it shakes out as the cuts (especially to defense) are implemented. Hopefully it stays this boring.

The rest of it is just a press release for the Republican congressional leadership and a nonsensical one at that filtered through a Republican consultant. The payroll tax cut expiring was Obama’s plan all along. Does anyone think he wanted payroll taxes to be lower permanently? The payroll tax allowed him to posture as a middle-class tax cutter in his first term. He effectively traded a temporary middle-class tax cut for a permanent high earner tax increase – and that’s not even counting the Obamacare tax increases. And he didn’t pay any political price for this as far as I can tell. And public opinion still favors a “balanced approach” of tax increases and Obama promises of spending cuts that will either not happen or take the form of centralized rationing of health care. But at least the Republicans made sure that “every American would feel the tax increase.” God save us from those kinds of “victories.”

Kate Pitrone
March 6th, 2013 | 6:33 am

I think that people looking at deficit numbers and the national debt to GDP ratio tend to agree that something must be done about government spending. That’s the Republican message and where Republicans have any control. The president’s “balanced approach” of the last four years hasn’t done much good for the economy and people feel it. That Republicans can do little about that is also infuriating the American public, who can accept that president just does what Democrats do, which is spend money on expensive promises. The assumption is, that’s all about the heart, the compassion thing again, and no one blames him for that. Maybe, as that “heart” thing makes everything worse, they might blame him.