Democrats True to Form: Tax More, Spend More

I don't know what to say (yet) about yesterday's debacle at the UN, so let's turn to the Obama Economy. 

 

CNBC: Obama's 'Fiscal Cliff' Proposal $1.6 Trillion in Tax Increases

 

Krauthammer: Robert E. Lee was offered better terms at Appomattox than Obama is offering Republicans

It’s not just a bad deal, this is really an insulting deal… Robert E. Lee was offered easier terms at Appomattox and he lost the Civil War. The Democrats won by 3% of the vote and they did not hold the House. Republicans won the House. So this is not exactly unconditional surrender, but that’s what the administration is asking of Republicans.

There not only are no cuts in this, there’s an increase in new spending with a stimulus – this is almost unheard of. I mean, what do they expect? They obviously expect the Republicans will cave on everything. I think Republican ought to simply walk away. The president is the president, he’s the leader.

 

Speaking of Lee's surrender, did you know that U.S. government (at that time, the "Yankees") confiscated the ancestral home of General Lee's wife, Mary Anna Custis Lee, and buried their war dead on that property? 

 

East front of Arlington Mansion (General Lee's home), with Union soldiers on the lawn, 06-28-1864

 

Today it known as Arlington National Cemetery. It's an interesting history:

When Civil War casualties overflowed hospitals and burial grounds near Washington, D.C., Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs proposed in 1864 that 200 acres of the Robert E. Lee family property at Arlington be confiscated for a cemetery.

The government acquired Arlington at a tax sale in 1864 for $26,800, equal to $398,237 today. Mrs. Lee had not appeared in person but rather had sent an agent, attempting to pay the $92.07 in property taxes (equal to $1,368.12 today) assessed on the estate in a timely manner. The government turned away her agent, refusing to accept the tendered payment.

In 1874, Custis Lee, heir under his grandfather's will passing the estate in trust to his mother, sued the United States claiming ownership of Arlington. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Lee's favor in United States v. Lee, deciding that Arlington had been confiscated without due process, Congress returned the estate to him.

The next year, Custis Lee sold it back to the government for $150,000 (equal to $3,174,545 today) at a signing ceremony with Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln.

 

 

McConnell 'Burst Into Laughter' as Geithner Outlined Obama's Plan

Geithner suggested $1.6 trillion in tax increases, McConnell says, but showed “minimal or no interest” in spending cuts....

.... Obama is pushing to raise the tax rates on couples earning more than $250,000 and individuals earning more than $200,000.

 

Sen. Jeff Sessions, Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee issued a statement saying, 

“Secretary Geithner has offered no plan on behalf of the President. Newspaper articles and leaks from anonymous aides are not a plan. Until this fantasy ‘plan’ from a secret meeting is made public and scored by the Congressional Budget Office it does not exist. Based on history, we can safely assume that reports that this ‘plan’ saves $4 trillion is a fabrication. It is a distraction that allows the White House to continue to run out the clock so it can have maximal leverage to force through a bad deal in the last minutes before midnight.”

 

Breitbart's Ben Shapiro points out that "The Obama administration tried this same tactic during the last debt ceiling negotiation in 2011. They tried it again during Obamacare."

So my question is, why would anyone be surprised - and unprepared - for the inevitable?

 

John Nolte offers five reasons Republicans should take us over the fiscal cliff. His best line is: 

... if conservatives can't count on the GOP to hold the line on taxes, what good are they?  

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

The funny thing is, after yammering for months about the need for a "balanced" plan, Obama submits a plan that can only be called lopsided, cockeyed, askew, or -- in plainer English -- farmisht and tsedrayt. To add insult to injury, he's included -- this is really bone-chilling -- a request for "permanently" lifting the debt ceiling, which would enable the Dims to spend money faster than the speed of light. What presumably began as a serious attempt to solve the fiscal-cliff crisis has devolved into a mockery. Question: In the minutes before this country commits national suicide, who gets to write the suicide note?