One way to know that President Oba ma’s much-hyped “fiscal austerity” speech bombed is that even members of his own deficit-reduction commission apparently felt betrayed.
Sure, Erskine Bowles, the commission’s Democratic chair, and Alan Simpson, the Republican, made some nice public statement about Obama’s deficit-reduction plan after they met with him yesterday — one day after the president unveiled his scheme to miraculously cut $4 trillion without reining in the looming catastrophes of Medicare and other entitlements. But people I spoke to in corporate America got a more unvarnished reaction in private from the debt-committee chieftains.
“What these guys can’t understand is how Obama can ask them to come up with something, and then he doesn’t listen to what they proposed,” a Wall Street executive who knows both men well told me a few hours after the president’s address on Wednesday.
More: “Erskine and Alan have been working both sides of the aisle trying to get people interested — and then the guy who appointed them basically ignores what they said.”
Say what you want about Bowles/Simpson’s solutions — living in high-tax New York, I was offended when Simpson said I needed to “sacrifice” more with higher taxes to fix the nation’s fiscal mess. But the commission clearly saw the problem right: The huge explosion in spending on such entitlements as Medicare is as much a threat to our economy as our reliance on Mideast oil; we need to find a way to pay for those programs or cut them down to size.
The Republicans were willing to listen to them: Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan, released last week, follows the commission in proposing major tax reform — closing loopholes, lowering rates and using some of the savings to balance the federal books.
Yet the president appears to forget
he ever appointed a bipartisan commission to deal with the nation’s fiscal issues. In fact, his tone Wednesday was highly partisan, as if runaway spending was just a right-wing boogeyman.
Of course, his “calculations” are pure fantasy. He offered no real details as to how his $4 trillion in “cuts” might be achieved, and he stretched them out over more than a decade. Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that we can afford all the big government programs already in action, not to mention ObamaCare, just by raising taxes on “millionaires and billionaires” who make $250,000 a year.
I don’t believe it — and neither, I’m told, do the people who run Obama’s deficit commission.
What appears to have Bowles and Simpson most upset is that the president basically dropped all their reform ideas — like the call to cut crippling entitlements, like Medicare, and Social Security — while embracing the tax hikes.
Worse, Obama on Wednesday basically treated entitlements as sacred — calling them a “fundamental commitment this country has kept for generations.”
Weirder still is his attitude toward taxes. For Bowles and Simpson, tax hikes are nothing short of a necessary evil to prevent fiscal Armageddon.
But the president insists on calling everyone making over $250,000 “millionaires and billionaires” — who, he wildly claims, have gotten “trillions of dollars of tax cuts” in recent years.
Anyway, he had to agree to extend the Bush-era tax rates last fall, when Democrats still had huge majorities in Congress. How does he figure he’ll get higher taxes now? Doesn’t seem to matter — his budget still returns to his obsession with raising taxes on the so-called rich.
Simpson and Bowles have to play nice publicly. But in private, I’m told, they figure their work has been reduced to rubble by the president who appointed them. Their only real value to him was as window dressing, so he could pretend he cared about the deficit and the economy in the runup to the last Election Day.
Wonder who he’ll find to be his patsies come fall 2012?
Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Net work senior correspondent.