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Back in February, Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner was responding to questions raised by House Budget Committee Chairman, Paul Ryan, and specifically what the broadly outlined Obama budget made public via an Obama speech was going to do with respect to our long-term debt problem.
Geithner's response:
“We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem. What we do know is we don’t like yours (Ryan's budget proposal.)”
Everything you need to know about the shameless cynicism, small-mindedness and lack of seriousness possessed by this administration is summed up in that quote. But you better get used to it because that quote will represent the emotional and intellectual rigor behind everything else you will hear from now until November.
High unemployment? We're going to tax the rich through the Buffet Rule.
High gas prices? We're going to investigate oil market speculators or something.
Unsustainable long-term debt? You suck.
If you haven't got the idea, you'll get it soon enough.
James Pethokoukis, writing for the Enterprise Blog summarizes government by gimmick: Obama's 7 most meaningless policy gestures,
here.
Bonus quote: A couple of months after the aforementioned speech that unveiled the Obama budget, at a House Budget Committee hearing, Chairman Paul Ryan and Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf had this exchange:
Ryan: “We got your re-analysis of the President’s budget. I won’t go back into that. But the President gave a speech on April 13th where he outlined a new budget framework that claims $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 12 years. Have you estimated the budget impact of this framework?”
Elmendorf: “No, Mr. Chairman. We don’t estimate speeches. We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis.”
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6 comments:
"oil speculators" are just the latest goldstein.
their two minutes of hate will be up soon.
I love the oil speculators stuff. The oil market dwarfs any capital any group of speculators might raise. It's simply impossible for speculators to have a long-term effect on the thing.
At least he's honest!
A Democrat and former commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said he'd never seen proof speculators caused fuel prices to spike.
And despite what Obama says we have 26% of the world's oil not 2%.
And 10 years ago Dems said no point to drilling in ANWR because it would take 10 years to show a result!
Ha!
If Obama said he was going to build the Keystone pipeline today, the price of gas would drop overnight as those same evil speculators would be betting on futures. It works both ways.
I've had the "it will take 10, 15, 20 years to bring that oil to market" argument for 10, 15, 20 years now.
For keystone to be built, Buffets train monopoly would need to be broken in Nebraska and his financing of Nebraska's "water" environmentalists and cornhusker kickback Senators would need to be curtailed.
My take on speculators, without them a rise in price would lead to shortages that would further increase prices over the short term. Overall, we trade speculator profits for supply shortages and gluts.
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