Obama Endorses Saudi Peace Ultimatum

Friday, April 03, 2009

Obama Endorses Saudi Peace Ultimatum

Well, you knew it was coming:

US President Barack Obama reiterated his support for the Saudi Mideast peace initiative in a meeting with King Abdullah on Thursday night, the White House said in a statement.

The February 2002 initiative calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from all territories taken in the Six Day War, including east Jerusalem, and a "just settlement" to the Palestinian refugee crisis in exchange for normalizing ties with the Arab world.

The leaders "reaffirmed the long-standing, strong relationship between the two countries," continued the statement after the two met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in London.

Yes, that must have happened during Obama's grotesque bowing and scraping act yesterday

For those of you who are unaware, this 'peace ultimatum' is essentially an Arab plan for Israel's national suicide.

The Israelis give up the strategic Golan Heights to the Syrians and Hezbollah and all of Judea and Samaria (AKA the West Bank), including land legally purchased from the Arabs via the Jewish National Fund to the Palestinians. The Israelis also give up half of Jerusalem, which means that Jews will be denied access to their holiest sites and will have to watch their religious shrines desecrated by the triumphant Arabs, just as they were prior to 1967.Needless to say, the Arabs are unwilling to tolerate a single Jew living in their countries, so the Jews will have to be removed..at Israel's expense, of course.

Then, having made thousands of their own citizens homeless, unemployed refugees and having retreated to indefensible borders, Israel allows itself to be flooded by thousands of genocidal Arab `refugees' and their descendants.

There's absolutely no mention of a `just settlement' for the almost one million Jewish refugees ethnically cleansed from the Arab world after 1948.

In exchange for committing what amounts to national suicide, the Jews of Israel get a guarantee of ill-defined `normalized ties' and peace from the Arabs.

Those `normalized ties' would last for as long as a dismembered vulnerable Israel manages to survive, and the `peace' would be the peace of the cemetery.

And keep in mind, none of this is subject to negotiation.It's an ultimatum for acceptance or rejection, just as it is.Even the Lefty and dovish Shimon Peres tried to regard it as a starting point for further discussions and was told in no uncertain terms that nothing in this proposal is subject to change.

President Barack Hussein Obama just endorsed it and a much as pledged to pressure the Israelis to accept it, knowing full well the Israelis have already said no.

This is of a piece with the news that the United States is definitely going to join the UN's 'Human Rights Council', where America will no doubt take part in the systematic demonization of Israel and the Jews while endorsing proposals to make criticism of Islam and sharia law a thought crime.

I think all but the most clueless can see which way the wind is blowing. And as for those genuinely deluded Jews who actually voted for this man, they may rest assured that the fallout will not be limited to Israel, and that the chickens coming home to roost will affect them as well, in a very painful and personal way.

Accompanied by the usual shock and surprise, of course.

The Obama Budget Passes...Welcome To Socialist Realism, American Style

President Barack Hussein Obama's $3.6 trillion dollar budget was approved by Congress yesterday.

It was done on a fairly sleazy way, just as the original stimulus was, without any Republican input whatsoever. The budget was presented as a 'reconciliation ' bill, a parliamentary squeeze play deliberately invoked by the Democrats to circumvent the Senate's normal rules requiring 60 votes to prevent a filibuster. It was designed to to limit debate, fast track passage and muzzle anyone attempting to oppose it.

Not one Republican voted for it, and a few of the more sensible Democrats, like Evan Bayh and Ben nelson joined them, but ultimately this was shoved through Congress like a triple strength enema.

The results of course will ultimately be quite similar, if a lot more expensive.

Obama is claiming that he going to shave $2 trillion off the debt (that's the cumulative deficit over his 10-year budget horizon), without raising taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year per household. That appears to be this week's definition of who's rich - subject to change, of course.

Economics Professor Micheal Boskin of Stanford cites the Congressional Budget Office numbers to show what's really going on:

He claims to reduce the deficit by half, to shave $2 trillion off the debt (the cumulative deficit over his 10-year budget horizon), and not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. While in a Clintonian sense correct (depends on what the definition of "is" is), it is far more accurate to describe Mr. Obama's budget as almost tripling the deficit. It adds $6.5 trillion to the national debt, and leaves future U.S. taxpayers (many of whom will make far less than $250,000) with the tab. And all this before dealing with the looming Medicare and Social Security cost explosion.

Some have laid the total estimated deficits and debt projections (as more realistically tallied by the Congressional Budget Office) on Mr. Obama's doorstep. But on this score the president is correct. He cannot rightly be blamed for what he inherited. A more accurate comparison calculates what he has already added and proposes to add by his policies, compared to a "do-nothing" baseline (see nearby chart).

The CBO baseline cumulative deficit for the Obama 2010-2019 budget is $9.3 trillion. How much additional deficit and debt does Mr. Obama add relative to a do-nothing budget with none of his programs? Mr. Obama's "debt difference" is $4.829 trillion -- i.e., his tax and spending proposals add $4.829 trillion to the CBO do-nothing baseline deficit. The Obama budget also adds $177 billion to the fiscal year 2009 budget. To this must be added the $195 billion of 2009 legislated add-ons (e.g., the stimulus bill) since Mr. Obama's election that were already incorporated in the CBO baseline and the corresponding $1.267 trillion in add-ons for 2010-2019. This brings Mr. Obama's total additional debt to $6.5 trillion, not his claimed $2 trillion reduction. That was mostly a phantom cut from an imagined 10-year continuation of peak Iraq war spending.

The claim to reduce the deficit by half compares this year's immense (mostly inherited) deficit to the projected fiscal year 2013 deficit, the last of his current term. While it is technically correct that the deficit would be less than half this year's engorged level, a do-nothing budget would reduce it by 84%. Compared to do-nothing, Mr. Obama's deficit is more than two and a half times larger in fiscal year 2013. Just his addition to the budget deficit, $459 billion, is bigger than any deficit in the nation's history. And the 2013 deficit is supposed to be after several years of economic recovery, funds are being returned from the financial bailouts, and we are out of Iraq.

Finally, what of the claim not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year? Even ignoring his large energy taxes, Mr. Obama must reconcile his arithmetic. Every dollar of debt he runs up means that future taxes must be $1 higher in present-value terms.Mr. Obama is going to leave a discounted present-value legacy of $6.5 trillion of additional future taxes, unless he dramatically cuts spending. (With interest the future tax hikes would be much larger later on.) Call it a stealth tax increase or ticking tax time-bomb.

What does $6.5 trillion of additional debt imply for the typical family? If spread evenly over all those paying income taxes (which under Mr. Obama's plan would shrink to a little over 50% of the population), every income-tax paying family would get a tax bill for $163,000. (In 10 years, interest would bring the total to well over a quarter million dollars, if paid all at once. If paid annually over the succeeding 10 years, the tax hike every year would average almost $34,000.) That's in addition to his explicit tax hikes. While the future tax time-bomb is pushed beyond Mr. Obama's budget horizon, and future presidents and Congresses will decide how it will be paid, it is likely to be paid by future income tax hikes as these are general fund deficits.

We can get a rough idea of who is likely to pay them by distributing this $6.5 trillion of future taxes according to the most recent distribution of income-tax burdens. We know the top 1% or 5% of income-taxpayers pay vastly disproportionate shares of taxes, and much larger shares than their shares of income. But it also turns out that Mr. Obama's massive additional debt implies a tax hike, if paid today, of well over $100,000 for people with incomes of $150,000, far below Mr. Obama's tax-hike cut-off of $250,000. (With interest, the tax hike would rise to more than $162,000 in 10 years, and over $20,000 a year if paid annually the following 10 years).In other words, a middle-aged two-career couple in New York or California could get a future tax bill as big as their mortgage.

And that's without accounting for shortfalls in projecting, something DC is notorious for. Or the trillion bucks Obama just gave the IMF during his Big Adventure over the pond.

Of course, there's another alternative...a banana republic style devaluation of the currency with the resulting massive inflation. Ask someone from Argentina who lived through it what that was like.

Welcome to the change you voted for, America, You'd better hope enough grown ups get elected to Congress in 2010 to put the brakes on as much of this as possible...