…a quick, informal selection of voices from across the country over the weekend found both pessimism and cynicism about the state of negotiations in Washington, resignation about the partisan jousting and more confusion than conniption about what exactly will happen if the president and his Republican opponents cannot make a deal to raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2.
And neither side, they say, looks good.
“They’re all boneheads,” said Steve Ruzika, 55, an entrepreneur from Boca Raton, Fla., who added that while he is politically conservative, he is fed up with both ends of the political spectrum.
“This has been brewing for a long time,” Mr. Ruzika said. “They should have solved it before now.”
[blockquote] On Friday, Mr. Obama strived to explain what it all meant and how bad things could get. “Congress has run up the credit card, and we now have an obligation to pay our bills,†he said, listing potential negative consequences of a default, like “where interest rates rise for everybody all throughout the country, effectively a tax increase on everybody.†[/blockquote]
If Obama really meant this we would have real cuts now in a budget. Instead he proposes tax increases now, and reductions in the rate of spending increases over the next 10 to 12 years with the heaviest reduction at the end. We have done this sort of thing over and over again and guess what, it never happens. Congress and the President at that time can’t take the heat.
So the only thing that Obama is actually proposing is increased taxes.