Clear Thinking

Originally at American Thinker

By Chuck Rogér

President Barack Obama believes that small businesses should pay for big government programs. Just ask the President’s Teasury secretary, Timothy Geithner.

Pushed for an explanation of Obama’s insistence on raising taxes on families earning $250,000 or more (encompassing a large portion of businesses that could provide many jobs), Geithner presented a hand-waving argument. If taxes are not raised on such earners, the government will have to “finance” a “tax benefit” for those earners. Geithner’s exact words:

We’re not doing it because we want to do it, we’re doing it because if we don’t do it, then, again, I have to go out and borrow a trillion dollars over the next 10 years to finance those tax benefits for the top 2 percent, and I don’t think I can justify doing that.

Stunning. Nothing short of bloody stunning.

I suppose that if some goon backs a grimy old truck up to your garage, holds a gun to your head, nabs all of your electronic entertainment systems, and drives away, then you have “benefited” from the scumbag’s decision not to take the washer and dryer.

When asked to respond specifically to the concern that higher taxes on small businesses would hurt America’s prospects for much-needed jobs, Geithner said that the Obama administration had determined that there was “no alternative” but to raise tax rates. The rationale? If tax rates are not increased, Washington would “have to shrink the overall size of government programs,” which would mean cutting spending on education.

Instructive. The liberal mind cannot see reduced spending as an alternative. Here we have a U.S. Treasury Secretary who seems incapable of grasping one of the two components of a balanced budget. Geithner continued to ply the tortured illogic of burdening small businesses:

We’re not doing it because we want to do it, we’re doing it because we see no alternative to a balanced approach to reduce our fiscal deficits.

To the liberal mind, the outflow side of the budgeting equation must be free to climb to infinity. Budgeting is a matter of finding infinitely increasing inflows to fund the outflows–a sort of a double infinity kinda thingie, there, then…

Geithner burps forth a gem, providing a looking glass directly into the “thought” process of a hopelessly big-government liberal:

If you don’t touch revenues and you leave in place the tax cuts for the top 2 percent that were put in place by President Bush, if you leave those in place and you’re trying to bring our deficits down over time, then you have to do exceptionally deep cuts in benefits for middle-class Americans and you have to shrink the overall size of government programs, things like education, to levels that we could not accept as a country.

Textbook progressive bunk, and a straw man argument. Americans could “accept” reduced spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and education over time. Human behavior results from conditioning. Increasingly since the 1930s, Americans have been conditioned to expect and rely on socialistic largesse. The addiction can be shaken. But the first step in the recovery process is admitting to the addiction. The second step is more important still: starting the weaning-off process.

America is besieged by a head-to-head battle of visions, an out-and-out war between two fundamentally different views of the world. One view sees people as owning their paths through life. The other view sees anointed government elitists as guides to the masses, equalizers of natural human inequalities.

Mr. Geithner’s rendition of the budgeting process epitomizes the view of the anointed ones. The outcome of the debt battle now raging between our anointed President and anointed Dems on one side and Republicans on the other will help determine if a reversal in behavioral conditioning occurs. Without such a reversal, we will continue down the socialist road, shepherded by our self-anointed masters.