You know Obama’s doublespeak is getting pretty damn bad when a lib like Jon Stewart calls him on it:
On the heels of this “spending reduction in the tax code” baloney the Standard & Poor credit agency has officially downgraded the outlook for the debt in the United States:
Standard & Poor’s on Monday downgraded the outlook for the United States to negative, saying it believes there’s a risk U.S. policymakers may not reach agreement on how to address the country’s long-term fiscal pressures.
“Because the U.S. has, relative to its ‘AAA’ peers, what we consider to be very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative from stable,” the agency said in a statement.
In an interview with CNBC, David Beers, S&P’s global head of sovereign ratings, said the agency has been “struck increasingly by the difference in how other governments are dealing with fiscal consolidation.”
“The U.S. to us looks to be an increasing outlier in that context,” Beers added.
As Kevin Williamson writes, this downgrade isn’t the opening act of our downfall….it’s the fat lady singing: (h/t Nan)
As one investment strategist put it to me this morning: We’ve been watching this train go by for a while now, and this is the caboose.
…A little over a year ago, the markets already were telling us that the government’s story about how it is finally going to fix its finances is pure fiction. Yields on U.S. Treasury bonds went higher than those on a number of blue-chip corporate bonds, leading your obedient servant to remark:
Who has better credit than Uncle Sam? If you ask the bond market, that elite list includes Berkshire Hathaway, Procter & Gamble, Lowe’s, Johnson & Johnson, and a host of other blue-chip corporate borrowers. The U.S. government has the ability to levy taxes on the largest national economy in the world, a vast and fearsome revenue-collection apparatus, and more than two centuries of constitutional government under its belt. P&G has Tampax.
As in the case of Enron, the smart money gets gone long before credit downgrades start hitting the headlines. As noted in this column, PIMCO, the world’s largest bond fund, got clear of U.S. Treasuries some time ago, following the lead of a number of hedge funds. The oil-exporting countries are dumping U.S. debt, too. Perhaps they know something we don’t?
Actually, they know something we do: Nothing about this is a secret. In the phrase adopted by Rep. Paul Ryan, what is coming is the most predictable economic crisis in our history: a nominal national debt of more than $14 trillion, a real national debt ten times that, and Barack Obama standing between the reformers and the needed reforms with a veto pen and excellent chances of being reelected in 2012. This isn’t sophisticated macroeconomic analysis; this is that anvil falling out of the sky onto the head of Wyle E. Coyote, and you don’t have to be a super-genius to figure out that it’s going to hurt like hell when it hits him. Even S&P gets that.
what is coming is the most predictable economic crisis in our history
And what is our President doing about it?
Spending some more, taxing some more, and oh….push green energy.
Just amazing. He’s pushing green energy while leaving a moratorium on drilling in place. Which just means higher energy costs for all while we become more beholden to OPEC:
At current prices of $108 per barrel, Americans this year will pay over $800 billion for oil, an amount equal to 33 percent of all federal tax revenues, with two thirds of the take going to fill the coffers of foreign regimes. If current trends continue, there is every prospect that oil prices will more than triple by Obama’s 2025 target date, leaving us paying more for oil than we pay to the federal government.
In other words, the Obama plan is a strategy whose stated goal entails the total defeat of the United States in the energy war.
…This wrecking operation on our economy is being perpetuated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a cartel of tyrannies and kleptocracies largely hostile or indifferent to the prosperity of the industrialized West. This cartel, which controls 80 percent of the world’s commercially viable oil reserves, is currently limiting its production to 1973 levels — despite a doubling of the size of the world economy in the nearly four decades since. As a result, we and our allies are having our economies looted as oil prices go through the roof, with even worse consequences falling upon the world’s poorest. An oil impost that causes depression in the advanced world can cause starvation in the Third World.
Stealth tax hikes, no cuts in spending, no more drilling for oil, higher energy costs, higher costs for staples because of those higher energy costs…add these kinds of things together and you have to come to the conclusion that the man isn’t serious about fixing anything.
He’s serious about getting re-elected.
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