Conservative Charles Krauthammer Thinks Tea Party Lost With Tax Compromise

There was pure amusement when I read the words from conservatives Charles Krauthammer, as he wrote about the ‘compromise’  tax plan President Obama fashioned with the Republicans. 

Obama is no fool. While getting Republicans to boost his own reelection chances, he gets them to make a mockery of their newfound, second-chance, post-Bush, Tea-Party, this-time-we’re-serious persona of debt-averse fiscal responsibility.

While there are liberals who think the estate tax was the deep knee-bend that shows capitulation and compromise can mean the same thing in the White House, there are conservatives who see the whole tax deal as a huge win by Obama at the expense of the GOP.

It can not be both ways.

I, for one, have mountains of trouble with the tax plan compromise proposed by the White House.  To add more debt for the continuation of these cuts is not logical.   Tax cuts that I have decried as unfair and unneeded from the moment they were proposed  over a decade ago, portions of which candidate Obama promised to undo, are now being pushed as some sort of economic salvation.  Add the unfair estate tax proposal and this becomes a fiscal nightmare.

So how then can Krauthammer claim this is all good for President Obama and the Democrats?

Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 – and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years – which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?

If Obama had asked for a second stimulus directly, he would have been laughed out of town. Stimulus I was so reviled that the Democrats banished the word from their lexicon throughout the 2010 campaign. And yet, despite a very weak post-election hand, Obama got the Republicans to offer to increase spending and cut taxes by $990 billion over two years. Two-thirds of that is above and beyond extension of the Bush tax cuts but includes such urgent national necessities as windmill subsidies.

No mean achievement. After all, these are the same Republicans who spent 2010 running on limited government and reducing debt. And this budget busting occurs less than a week after the president’s deficit commission had supposedly signaled a new national consensus of austerity and frugality.

Some Republicans are crowing that Stimulus II is the Republican way – mostly tax cuts – rather than the Democrats’ spending orgy of Stimulus I. That’s consolation? This just means that Republicans are two years too late. Stimulus II will still blow another near-$1 trillion hole in the budget.