Who knows; the only mystery left is how much damage will the last gasp of 2016 bring?
by Victor David Hanson // PJ Media
Three things so far have saved Obama’s otherwise unfortunate tenure; all came over his own objections.
One, after the 2010 midterm tsunami, the newly elected House Republicans put a lid on spending — ratified by the wins of 2014. Sequestration is a crude blunderbuss and slashed defense, but it at least slowed down Obama’s disastrous serial $1 trillion-plus budget deficits. In spending terms, it certainly has vastly reduced the government’s share of GDP. We know that because Obama occasionally brags of falling deficits, as if to say, “Thank you for not letting me be entirely myself.” When he leaves office, we will have $20 trillion in debt and nearly 100 million permanently out of the work force, as well as uncontrolled and unaddressed entitlement spending on life support through zero-interest rates. But we will still be alive for now, thanks to sequestration. Shutting down the government may have been politically unwise (or not — given the 2014 midterm elections [1]), but it kept the debt financeable.
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We don’t know yet what issue will end up driving the autumn phase of the 2016 election. In 2008 a hectoring Obama thought it would always be Iraq — an issue that he had scrubbed from his website by mid-2008 when the surge had rendered his anti-war traction irrelevant.
President Obama just said this about Donald Trump’s disparagement of the last seven years: “In the echo chamber that is presidential politics, everything is dark and everything is terrible.” Presidential candidates “don’t seem to offer many solutions for the disasters that they perceive, but they’re quick to tell you who to blame . . . I’m here to say there’s nothing particularly patriotic or American about talking down America, especially when we stand as one of the few sources of economic strength in the world.” In 2008 candidate Obama, then in Trump’s current contender position, said this about a lame-duck sitting president, while more or less kept talking down both America and its then-current government for most of the campaign: The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents — No. 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic. In Obama’s world, when you attack a sitting president, you do so on grounds that he is unpatriotic; when you are a sitting president you defend yourself from those who do what you did, also on grounds they are unpatriotic. In Obama’s alternate universe, adding $4 trillion is unpatriotic and irresponsible, but adding $9 trillion “by his lonesome” is exactly what? And if Obama as a senator voted to shut down the government over that accruing $4 trillion, what should do the Senate do about double that amount?