Posted 5:51 PM by Gene

The new spending is coupled with the largest tax increase in U.S. history -- $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

Who will pay all those taxes? The president says it's just the rich. But let's keep in mind that a lot of these "rich" people are actually small-business owners, and small businesses create 70 percent of the new jobs each year.

This is a typical con-SER-va-tive trope. When your typical con-SER-va-tive says it you can be sure he's only marginally interested in little guys (much as, say, Jo-NAH must pay lip-service to anti-abortionists to pursue his nihilistic pop-cultyure fantasies) and eyeball-staringly intensely interested in the hyperrich. As we learned too well under the late unlamented Dubya, little guys are just a rhetorical tool to justify all sorts of idiotic giveaways to the ExxonMobils -- and the Lehmans and Madoffs who have cleaned so many of us out. And most of them happened, sad to say, on the P. O. P.'s watch.

And it is dismaying that Sen. Gregg or his interns use this trope, for the bulk of his or his interns' op-ed makes sense: We're going bananas with our budget for what? To bankrupt our grandchildren? But that's the advantage of one-party rule in a democracy: You don't have to ask tough questions; you just force them on your heirs.