What to make of this assertion:
By affirming liberalism’s lodestar — the principle that government’s grasp on national resources must constantly increase — Obama made himself a spectator in a Washington more conservative than it was during the Reagan presidency.
He's talking about Obama's insistence that revenues be a part of the debt solution. Now revenues have emphatically not kept increasing over the last thirty years, and right now, have hit a fifty-year low, as a proportion of GDP. To quote Reagan adviser, Bruce Bartlett:
Revenue has been below 15 percent of G.D.P. since 2009, and the last time we had three years in a row when revenue as a share of G.D.P. was that low was 1941 to 1943.
Revenue has averaged 18 percent of G.D.P. since 1970 and a little more than that in the postwar era. At a similar stage in previous business cycles, two years past the trough, revenue was considerably higher: 18 percent of G.D.P. in 1977 after the 1973-75 recession; 17.3 percent of G.D.P. in 1984 after the 1981-82 recession, and 17.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1993 after the 1990-91 recession. Revenue was markedly lower, however, at this point after the 2001 recession and was just 16.2 percent of G.D.P. in 2003.
So Will is simply empirically wrong. Obama is not arguing that "government's grasp on national resources must constantly increase", he's arguing that when government's grasp has fallen to a fifty year nadir and an ageing society requires funding, revenues should be on the table.
You know: like the radical left government running Britain right now. Will wants to make Obama a commie when he's really only a Tory. Not that Will would remember what it was once like to be one of those.
(Photo: Wiki.)
The Dish 