House of Eratosthenes

I noticed last night that President Obama received high marks from democrats all around during His press conference last night, particularly when He accused His opponents of failing to come up with any alternatives when criticizing the President’s budget. My memory suggests that Bob Shrum, appearing on Bill O’Reilly’s show, called it Obama’s finest moment; it certainly is emerging as a consensus viewpoint.

And there’s an interesting reason why some of these critics haven’t put out their own budget. I mean, we haven’t seen an alternative budget out of them.

And the reason is because they know that, in fact, the biggest driver of long-term deficits are the huge health care costs that we’ve got out here that we’re going to have to tackle and we — that if we don’t deal with some of the structural problems in our deficit, ones that were here long before I got here, then we’re going to continue to see some of the problems in those out-years.

It has, I notice, lately been defined as a favorited defense, from a party that is becoming increasingly defensive. Where’s your idea, Mister Big Shot?

I hope this continues. This impresses me as an argument that has the potential to persuade lots of people at first, but wear thin rather quickly. Hey, don’t throw gasoline on a burning house; it won’t extinguish the flames it’ll just make them burn faster. Well you don’t have any better ideas do ya?

It’s one thing to use the “got any better ideas?” argument when questions have been raised as to whether you’re helping. It’s an entirely different situation when someone has pointed out you may be doing harm. And I suspect the democrats understand that is starting to apply here. They’re arguing that the government should bear more and more of the responsibility, and therefore the cost, of America’s healthcare system, and here’s President Obama saying “the biggest driver of long-term deficits are the huge health care costs.”

How much longer before the Main Street voter looks around at our largest American cities, the ones that have been laboring along under democrat management for generations, and notices: Hey, that’s all they ever do over there. Bellyache about costs. And their costs for everything — parking, apartment rents, jars of mayonnaise, calling in a city electrician to change a light bulb over my desk that I’m not allowed to change — are vastly exorbitant compared to an equivalent expense somewhere else…and that seems to be because democrats have been running things. This is the future of the whole country now?

With that realization, “Where’s Your Idea?” starts to wear out its welcome. My idea? Go through things line by line, and compare each item to the equivalent cost in a locality that hasn’t been run by democrats. How’s that for an idea?

Aside from being so much more effectively applied to a sprint than to a marathon, the “I don’t see any better ideas outta you guys” argument, here, is blatantly hypocritical. The democrat party had seven whole years to come up with a more effective, alternative method for extracting information from detainees at Guantanamo, for example. Now, did you hear anything from them about this? I didn’t. Throughout the entire time it was the exact opposite of offering an alternative idea; it was “stop it,” and “because of this, we’re no better than they are,” and “it does no good to defend the country if this is what it takes,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Evidently it would have been far better to surrender; after all, that way nobody would be hurt!

There are a lot of other problems with relying overly much on this argument. But the only other one I think demands mention here is the legal one: Submitting a budget to the Congress is the President’s job. As the democrats like to tell us, often, they won the election and nobody else’s opinion should count on anything. Logically, you can’t hammer away on that one, and then swivel around and start in with the “Where’s Your Idea?” argument. You either got the job or you didn’t.

People can criticize the way you do it, without stepping up and offering to do it for you. That’s one of the many things that make it tough, I guess.

I wonder if Obama, or any other democrat, is really up for it?

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Memo For File LXXXIVWednesday, March 25th, 2009

Memo For File LXXXIV
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009