Fiscal Cliff Ahead

The Foundation

"Have you something to do to-morrow; do it to-day." --Benjamin Franklin

Government

"The Congressional Budget Office has forecasted a fresh recession to hit next year if Taxmageddon, a nearly $500 billion tax increase, hits the nation and Congress and the President drive us off the 'fiscal cliff.' ... In a new report, Heritage's J.D. Foster explains that the very fact that we can see a recession coming is shocking. 'Economic forecasters almost never forecast recessions,' he says. ... The problem is extremely clear. Congress has left town and isn't scheduled to return until after the November election. With every day that passes, the economy drags, as the uncertainty of January 1 looms. ... Business owners are looking at next year's taxes already and thinking they can't afford to hire. Investors are holding back from expansions and new ventures. This massive uncertainty is holding back all growth and keeping unemployment stubbornly above 8 percent, while millions have dropped out of the labor force because they are so discouraged. ... Think about this: If you're a middle-class American family, Taxmageddon means that your taxes are going up about $4,100 next year. ... It starts to hit home that you have to come up with that $4,100 somehow. You're going to have to make cuts in your lifestyle to be able to pay this tax increase. ... As Foster said, 'President Obama should demand that Congress return to defuse Taxmageddon, and Congress should immediately heed his call. The job need only take a few days away from their campaigning.'" --Heritage Foundation's Amy Payne

For the Record

"Americans must be wondering how much more of this 'recovery' they can afford. New figures from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, compiled by Sentier Research, show that the typical American household's real (inflation-adjusted) income has actually dropped 5.7 percent during the Obama 'recovery.' Using constant 2012 dollars (to adjust for inflation), the median annual income of American households was $53,718 as of June 2009, the last month of the recession. Now, after 38 months of this 'recovery,' it has fallen to $50,678 -- a drop of $3,040 per household. Yet it gets worse. Amazingly, incomes have dropped even more during the 'recovery' than they did during the recession. In fact, they've dropped more than twice as much as they did during the recession. From the start to the end of the recession, the real median income of American households fell $1,413, or 2.6 percent. From the end of the recession to the present day, it has dropped $3,040, or 5.7 percent. This begs the question: What kind of 'recovery' compares unfavorably with the recession from which it's ostensibly recovering?" --The Weekly Standard's Jeffrey H. Anderson

Political Futures

"For six months, [Mitt Romney's] been matching Obama small ball for small ball. A hit-and-run critique here, a slogan-of-the-week there. His only momentum came when he chose Paul Ryan and seemed ready to engage on the big stuff: Medicare, entitlements, tax reform, national solvency, a restructured welfare state. Yet he has since retreated to the small and safe. When you're behind, however, safe is fatal. Even his counterpunching has gone miniature. Obama has successfully painted Romney as an out of touch, unfeeling plutocrat whose only interest is to cut taxes for the rich. Romney has complained in interviews that it's not true. He has proposed cutting tax rates, while pledging that the share of the tax burden paid by the rich remains unchanged (by 'broadening the base' as in the wildly successful, revenue-neutral Reagan-O'Neill tax reform of 1986). But how many people know this? Where is the speech that hammers home precisely that point, advocates a reformed tax code that accelerates growth without letting the rich off the hook, and gives lie to the Obama demagoguery about dismantling the social safety net in order to enrich the rich? ... Make the case. Go large. About a foreign policy in ruins. About an archaic, 20th-century welfare state model that guarantees 21st-century insolvency. And about an alternate vision of an unapologetically assertive America abroad unafraid of fundamental structural change at home. It might just work. And it's not too late." --columnist Charles Krauthammer

Opinion in Brief

"At home, unemployment is stuck above 8 percent. Twenty-three million are out of work. Millions of others have given up looking for jobs. One American in six is on food stamps. Small businesses are terrified of ObamaCare. The economy ran out of gas four years ago and the president still thinks the only way to get it going again is to fill up the tank with trillions of dollars of debt and make successful people pay for the tow truck. Overseas, we have a dead ambassador and three other dead Americans in Libya. Dozens of our embassies are being threatened by mobs. Iran is building a nuke. Syria is mired in a bloody civil war. Egypt's new democracy is turning against us. ... Meanwhile, what does President 'Eye Candy' do [last] week? He goes before the United Nations and can't bring himself to even mention the words 'Islamic extremists.' ... But in their perverse way of thinking, the Obama Gang wants the American people to believe Romney is a bad guy for creating wealth and being a successful businessman. Americans are supposed to be angry with Romney for paying 'only' 14 percent in taxes or reducing his federal tax bite by giving $4 million to charity in 2011. ... Mitt needs to show us how angry he is at what Obama has done to America. He needs to show us he's as 'mad as hell' and can't take it for another four years. Come on, Mitt -- get as mad as the rest of us." --columnist Michael Reagan

Insight

"To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection -- a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end." --economist Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)

The Gipper

"The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment." --Ronald Reagan

Re: The Left

"Liberals have never answered the question: what of those who do not choose to join in a 'common end' that government has chosen for them? What of those who refuse to 'belong to government'? These unfortunate souls must be dealt with, as Obama's departments and agencies are dealing with them: by silencing them, litigating against them, jailing them, and ruining their businesses and reputations. Those tactics, and more, were exactly what European leftists from Mussolini to Stalin resorted to. ... Obama's rationale for a second term is that he wants to govern, and that should be enough. Or as Jay Carney suggested, just shut up. ... George Washington called government 'a dangerous servant and a fearful master.' Thomas Paine called it 'a necessary evil.' For Obama, government is the thing we all belong to, the thing that 'made this country great.' Four more years of Obama will not make this country great, but it will ensure that we belong to government to an unimaginable extent. Obama's message is: 'You and everything you own belong to me.'" --columnist Jeffrey Folks

Essential Liberty

"The American founding was revolutionary in its embrace of the universality of human rights (even as it fell so short of its own ideals with the institution of slavery). Since then, the West has fought several civil wars to break away from various tribal ideologies, including not just monarchism and imperialism but Nazism (racial tribalism), Communism (economic tribalism) and fascism (national tribalism). In fits and starts, we've moved toward ever greater voluntarism, which is a fancy way of saying we've moved toward greater individual liberty. According to the American creed, no one, and no thing, is the boss of me unless I agree to it. To a certain extent, that's even true -- at least in theory -- about the government, which is a representative institution created solely by and for the people, who are sovereign. But the instinctive attraction of tribalism endures. ... Because the moral superiority of liberty is irrefutable, totalitarians often feel the need to wrap barbarism in the language of freedom. ... Similarly, the Muslim Brotherhood stooge running Egypt doesn't care about free speech or tolerance; he cares about his own theocratic will to power -- and making Americans grovel. There are more practical reasons not to hold our liberties hostage to the bloodlust of a foreign mob, but underneath them all is the instinctual tribal refusal to let marauders tear down what we've built." --columnist Jonah Goldberg

Culture

"It isn't the policies and attitude of the United States toward the Arab world that need changing. It's the attitude and policies of the Arab world that need to change. For a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who still subscribes to the group's radical beliefs, to blame America for problems in the Arab world is like blaming the mirror for what it reflects. Which nation is in greater need of an attitude adjustment? ... Hatred for all things Jewish, Christian and Western can be found in children's textbooks in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and throughout the Middle East -- hate that is then reinforced by mullahs and Arab media. ... How many times has Israel compromised ... as it sought peace with its Arab neighbors and the Palestinians? And how many times have the Palestinians not kept up their end of agreements, and, in fact, continue to incite their own people to 'jihad' for the purpose of eliminating Israel? Which attitudes are in most need of reform? ... I don't like the looser sexual mores either, but the difference is that in America we don't have 'virtue' police, as some Arab and Muslim states do, to force people to live and act in accordance with the dictates of self-appointed and often hypocritical religious and political elites. Respect cuts both ways." --columnist Cal Thomas

Reader Comments

"Mark Alexander's essay The FDR Model for Buying Presidential Elections is the most profound and complete summation I've read of the position of our country and how Obama orchestrated it, and how he is moving toward his goal! Thank you for putting it in print. If only every American could read and understand the truth. Wish this could be one of Romney's speeches!" --Carole in Colorado

"After reading The FDR Model for Buying Presidential Elections, I want to encourage my fellow Patriots. If and only if the majority of Americans get off their lazy behinds and go vote, we will be able to hold the elected accountable. As for Obama's polls, the reputable polls have this election about dead even. Obama being the incumbent has a 50/50 chance by default. We cannot change that, but we can ignore all the hyperbole and get everyone to vote right up to the last minute." --Ken in Hastings, Florida

"After recent events in the Middle East and Obama's pathetic speech at the UN, it is indeed sad to witness the 'leadership' of our president and his State Department. We are being played for fools. I guess the Cole incident, the first WTC bombing, Kobar towers -- not to mention 9/11 -- were just 'bumps in the road' too." --RCS in Calverton

"Everything to this president is a bump in the road. Iran, budget, deficits, unemployment and people in general with the obvious exception of re-election. Honestly, has the man given us a solid month of leadership since his election?" --Andy in Katy, Texas

"In response to Friday's Digest story about the Village Academic Curriculum, I think the real reason isn't what the schools are or are not doing so much as the complete disintegration of intact families. There is no program for that. It the natural effect of moral decay." --Eileen in Coatesville

The Last Word

"The average national unemployment rate in the previous administration was 5.2 percent. The average in Mr. Obama's presidency is 9 percent. The budget deficit totaled $1.18 trillion over the last four years of George W. Bush's presidency. Mr. Obama's four deficits have added $5 trillion to the national debt. When Mr. Obama was sworn into office on Inauguration Day 2009, regular gas was selling for about $1.90 a gallon. Today, under Mr. Obama's energy policies, it is approaching $4 a gallon. Mr. Obama says that 'we're making progress.' This is the 'new normal.' We're moving forward, not backward. Just what kind of Orwellian compass is he using? In his '60 Minutes' interview, Mr. Obama kept falling back on his excuse that he 'inherited' an economy that was in a deep recession. Ronald Reagan inherited a deeper one where the unemployment rose to 10.8 percent. Four years later, when he ran for re-election, the economy was expanding at 6.3 percent, the jobless rate was about 7 percent and he won re-election by 49 states to 1. Mr. Obama lamely insists things would be better but for the House Republicans. But Reagan faced a Democrat-controlled House and it gave him the across-the-board tax cuts that got our economy moving again. As Mr. Romney repeatedly says, 'This is the best Obama can do, but it's not the best America can do.'" --columnist Donald Lambro

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team