If a Republican president can’t address a Republican-controlled Congress without paying lip service to the idea of cutting spending, what good are Republicans?

Glenn Reynolds has a good answer. 

Okay, a few points, starting with the fact that I actually do care about the debt.

But the demise of the Tea Party movement showed that nobody much in DC cares, in either party. “Lip service” is the most we’ve ever gotten, and not even that when there was even a hint of danger that it might actually be taken seriously.

I think that we simply can’t address the debt, barring an immediate crisis too big to finagle our way out of it, under our current political arrangements. I think Trump may be helpful here not because he cares about the debt — he doesn’t, or, if he does, he realizes that there’s nothing that can be done under existing political arrangements — but because he offers some hope of disrupting current political arrangements. Until those arrangements are disrupted, or the bottom drops out of U.S finances, nothing much can be done.

Alternative take: In 2012 with Mitt Romney, America had a chance at a turnaround artist, and it passed. In 2016, we elected Trump. And his expertise is different.

First we have to change the culture in Washington.

Without any benefit cuts, Obamacare costs to rise

Unexpectedly!

Feds Can’t Verify $2.8 Billion in Obamacare Subsidies

It's a rounding error in the Obama budget.

Worse Is the New Normal - By Design

Mark Steyn replies to a comment made by a reader:

an exasperated reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to be stupid.” That’s to say, Western democracies and their citizens are the wealthiest societies ever known, and no matter how much of our energies are wasted on pointless hyper-regulation for the business class and multigenerational welfare for the dependency class and Transgender and Colonialism Studies for our glittering youth, we can afford it, and the central fact of our wealth will ensure that our fortunes do not change.

But we live in a world which is actually very carefully balanced on a precipice. We may be wealthy, fat, living in McManions. But the modern world around us is actually much more than simply assemblies of brick, wood and metal. It’s a finely tuned system that’s very vulnerable to disruption. Let the power go off for a few days or weeks and you quickly find that you can’t cook. Let the time expand to a few months and you run out of food because there is no transportation, no refrigeration, no light or heat, not “health care” system. High rise buildings become uninhabitable to the average urban dweller. It’s at that point that you realize that all the gadgets that make our lives what they are become useless lumps of metal and plastic little more use than the raw material from which they were formed. It’s at that point that the people who are most likely to survive are the naked nomadic herdsmen you once saw pictured in National Geographic magazine, if they actually still exist.

Steyn concludes:

Obama’s pointless, traceless super-spending is now (as they used to say after 9/11) “the new normal.” Nancy Pelosi assured the nation last weekend that everything that can be cut has been cut and there are no more cuts to be made. And the disturbing thing is that, as a matter of practical politics, she may well be right. Many people still take my correspondent’s view: If you have old money well managed, you can afford to be stupid — or afford the government’s stupidity on your behalf. If you’re a social-activist celebrity getting $20 million per movie, you can afford the government’s stupidity. If you’re a tenured professor or a unionized bureaucrat whose benefits were chiseled in stone two generations ago, you can afford it. If you’ve got a wind farm and you’re living large on government “green energy” investments, you can afford it. If you’ve got the contract for signing up Obamaphone recipients, you can afford it.

But out there beyond the islands of privilege most Americans don’t have the same comfortably padded margin for error, and they’re hunkering down. Obamacare is something new in American life: the creation of a massive bureaucracy charged with downsizing you — to a world of fewer doctors, higher premiums, lousier care, more debt, fewer jobs, smaller houses, smaller cars, smaller, fewer, less; a world where worse is the new normal. Would Americans, hitherto the most buoyant and expansive of people, really consent to live such shrunken lives? If so, mid-20th-century America and its assumptions of generational progress will be as lost to us as the Great Ziggurat of Ur was to 19th-century Mesopotamian date farmers.

George Orwell, after attending a meeting of impoverished but passive miners, remarked sadly that “there is no turbulence left in England.” The Democrats, and much of the Republican establishment, have made a bet that there is no turbulence left in America, and the citizenry will stand mute before Obamacare’s wrecking ball. Unless they’re willing to accept a worse life for their children and grandchildren, middle-class Americans need to prove them wrong.

It takes a lot to destroy a nation as big and wealthy as ours.  But the very things that have made us wealthy have created vulnerabilities that most people are as unaware of as were the people who boarded those jet planes on 9/11/2001 and failed to live till the end of the day. 

First, They Came For The Cypriots...

Via Investors Business Daily

Rule Of Law: Markets tumbled after Cyprus and the EU said they might tax private bank accounts to pay for a bailout. Arbitrary property grabs are a new low and a bad precedent in this crisis. Worse still, it can happen here.

As bad as tumbling markets around the world are, they seem to be the only signal strong enough to catch the attention of Europe's otherwise unaccountable bureaucrats who have long since learned to ignore street riots.

As stocks fell from Tokyo to New York, Europe's leaders are scrambling to say they had nothing to do with the cause — the shutdown of all Cyprus banks and ATMs for at least three days and the expropriation of a large chunk of each now-captive account, as a "tax" to pay for Cyprus' $13 billion EU bailout, Europe's fifth.

It appears that Cypriot banks made very bad investment decisions costing them billions. Without a bailout they will go bankrupt. So the EU demands that the Cypriot government confiscate a large part of every saver's account in return for enough money to bail out the banks.

Which teaches everyone a valuable lesson. The government can do anything to you if you can't defend yourself. Banks accounts are not safe from government confiscation. Neither are any other accounts held by any other financial institution and not held by you personally.

Suddenly the Second Amendment and stuff under your mattress become increasingly important.

Already Congressional Democrats are plotting the expropriation of Americans' private 401(k) and IRA retirement savings accounts in favor of "a guaranteed income." If bank accounts can be casually expropriated in Cyprus to pay for big-spending governments and bailouts, there is no reason a nice slice of the $19 trillion in retirement accounts can't get the same treatment.

If it happens, it will signal the end of individual freedom and the return of feudalism.

Frederick Hayek had a phrase for this: "The Road To Serfdom." Let's hope there will be more than just markets to make this state theft of private property stop.

From Glenn Reynolds:

Like I said, an enterprising GOP member of the House or Senate would introduce a bill immediately to make such shenanigans illegal — and dare the Dems to oppose it.

This is a golden opportunity for Rand Paul or Ted Cruz.

DRUDGE and now UPI catching on to Harry Reid lies.

Harry Reid caught lying about '$2.6 trillion' in cuts passed by Senate...

Harry Reid twice wrong on '$2.6 trillion' cuts in 'This Week' interview

How do we know?   His lips were moving.  Well, who can blame his for uttering ever more blatant lies, the press has been covering up for his and all the other lies the Democrats have been told, I'm sure it's s shock to him if he's ever held to the truth.