During fiscal cliff negotiations President Obama told Speaker Boehner that the federal government doesn’t have a spending problem. Seriously, that’s what Boehner told The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore.
What stunned House Speaker John Boehner more than anything else during his prolonged closed-door budget negotiations with Barack Obama was this revelation: “At one point several weeks ago,” Mr. Boehner says, “the president said to me, ‘We don’t have a spending problem.’ ”
I am talking to Mr. Boehner in his office on the second floor of the Capitol, 72 hours after the historic House vote to take America off the so-called fiscal cliff by making permanent the Bush tax cuts on most Americans, but also to raise taxes on high earners. In the interim, Mr. Boehner had been elected to serve his second term as speaker of the House. Throughout our hourlong conversation, as is his custom, he takes long drags on one cigarette after another.
Mr. Boehner looks battle weary from five weeks of grappling with the White House. He’s frustrated that the final deal failed to make progress toward his primary goal of “making a down payment on solving the debt crisis and setting a path to get real entitlement reform.” At one point he grimly says: “I need this job like I need a hole in the head.”
The president’s insistence that Washington doesn’t have a spending problem, Mr. Boehner says, is predicated on the belief that massive federal deficits stem from what Mr. Obama called “a health-care problem.” Mr. Boehner says that after he recovered from his astonishment—”They blame all of the fiscal woes on our health-care system”—he replied: “Clearly we have a health-care problem, which is about to get worse with ObamaCare. But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem.” He repeated this message so often, he says, that toward the end of the negotiations, the president became irritated and said: “I’m getting tired of hearing you say that.” (Read More)
How do you negotiate with someone like that? The national debt is now over $16.4 trillion and it just keeps going up because the government is spending too much money, and he denies it. Is he stupid?
For years we’ve been trying to decide, “Is Obama stupid or is he purposely trying to destroy the US economy?”
Now we know the answer. He’s stupid as a can of Spam.
I don’t know, I’m thinking he’s more criminally insane.
@lonelycon Alcoholics don’t have a drinking problem either.
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Although I LOVE the comment “He’s stupid as a can of Spam” (hahahahaha!), I don’t really believe that. I believe it’s allllllll done on purpose. You really can’t divorce a job from your personal beliefs, and only a little research will shed light on Obama’s beliefs. Unfortunately, no one cared through two election cycles and I think they STILL don’t care. Those who support him share his beliefs or really are “stupid as a can of Spam” and you’ll never be able to dumb it down enough for them to understand how things work. Obama isn’t stupid; he’s just growing weary and snappish because saying a thing 5,000 times can’t convince some of us that it’s true.
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Perhaps the problem is that, even though he’s (supposedly) an executive now, Barack Hussein Obama is still a legislator at heart, and for legislators, the only spending problem they have is not having more money to spend.
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The Democrats want to raise taxes again — that is, after all, simply what they do — but, regardless of who was President, and regardless of what tax rates were, the federal government has taken in more than 20% of GDP in total tax revenue in only three years, two of which were during World War II. The record tax bite was 20.9% of GDP, in 1944.
Yet Barack Hussein Obama wants to spend more than 22% of GDP at the federal level, and he’s currently at 24%. How that isn’t the problem is beyond me.
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Of course, if Mr Boehner thinks he needs the job of Speaker like a hole in the head, he had the option not to run for it.
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