After listening to the delicate flowers in the GOP whine for the past week about how brutally partisan President Obama’s deficit speech was, I thought I should remind them of some of the things Paul Ryan said in his budget plan. Here’s a taste of what Obama was responding to:
Where the President has failed, House Republicans will lead….[The president’s budget] Locks in reckless spending spree….Never reaches primary balance — failing to clear even the low bar the administration set for itself.
….The President and his party’s leaders embarked on a stimulus spending spree that added hundreds of billions of dollars to the debt, yet failed to deliver on its promises to create
jobs. Acute economic hardship was exploited to enact unprecedented expansions of government power.
….Since his inauguration, the President has promoted a heavy-handed compliance culture in the energy sector, brimming with regulations and reckless spending on government-appointed winners and losers…. Gas prices have more than doubled since the President took of?ce. Burdensome and ineffective regulations on businesses in the service of dubious environmental goals have driven up the prices of many products and services, while creating barriers for needed capital investment and job creation.
….The insistence by the President and his party’s leaders on spending money the government does not have has yielded trillion-dollar de?cits now and into the future….By failing to address the unsustainable growth of autopilot spending programs, the President’s budget commits this nation to a crushing burden of debt.
I’ll forego my fainting couch for the moment. I’m pretty sure I can handle this kind of rhetoric. But somebody needs to remind Republicans that tough partisan talk wasn’t exactly invented last Wednesday by President Obama’s speechwriters.
