Obama "agnostic" on tax pledge: Real problem "just a mismatch between money coming in and money going out"

By: J.P. Freire
Washington Examiner
Feb. 13, 2010

From promising not to raise "one dime" in taxes on >250k families to "all ideas are on the table." Prepare to be looted America.He's not only after small businesses. Everything's on the table, according to an interview with President Obama in Bloomberg/Business Week to be released tomorrow:

"The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table," Obama said. "So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions."

But the headline of the Bloomberg piece itself misses the news entirely, claiming Obama is "agnostic" on deficit cuts. But it's tax hikes he had ruled out. This illustrates his dislike for preconditions, as noted in the article:

In the interview, Obama said that putting preconditions on the agenda of a bipartisan advisory commission, which he said he would soon establish, would just undermine its purpose.

And there's this whopper:

“Our real problem is not the spike in spending last year, or the lost, even the lost revenues last year, as significant as those are,” he said. “The real problem has to do with the fact that there is a just a mismatch between the amount of money coming in and the amount of money going out. And that is going to require some big, tough choices that, so far, the political system has been unable to deal with.”

Obama's solution? Not to rein in the money that's going out, but to make sure more of your money is going in. But if the president were serious about fixing the deficit problem and about "changing how things work," he ought to be looking at cutting vast swaths of the federal budget rather than offering rosy outlooks, like the inclusion of revenue from as-yet-unpassed cap and trade legislation, which OMB Director Peter Orszag has always seen as a means to increase revenue.