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Barack Obama ain’t afraid of no stinkin’ fiscal cliff. Why should he be? When the rest of us go over the cliff, doomed to pain and oblivion among the soup cans, plastic bags and empty soda-pop bottles at the bottom of the abyss, he’ll be soaring over the rooftops as only a tin-pot messiah can.
When the George W. Bush tax cuts expire at midnight on New Year’s Eve, with the rest of us singing a tearful adieu to Auld Lang Syne, the president will be popping corks. He’ll have his higher taxes. The joke will be on us, but nobody at the bottom of the cliff will be laughing.
Barack Obama’s goal is to raise taxes, and how he does that is of small consequence. He is determined not to cut spending. This has become clear enough to all. He will have redeemed FDR’s famous mantra – “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect” – in a way that Mr. Roosevelt could never have imagined. Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent,” the Americans who get a monthly government check, will balloon toward a hundred percent. Cuts, reforms, restraints, disciplines of any kind will be silly notions of the past. Dependency will be enthroned.
Once this is understood, there’s no mystery about why the “negotiations” between the Democrats and the Republicans have never amounted to very much. Mr. Obama reads the November 6 election result as a landslide, though 51 to 49 is far from a landslide. Nevertheless he is bold, and acting as if it were. He, and even a lot of timid and fearful Republicans, never absorbed the home truth that nothing recedes like success.
For now, everything is going his way. Mr. Obama’s vision of America is one he learned in his community-organizing days. Americans have to give up the idea that America is, in Lincoln’s memorable formulation, the exceptional nation, and learn to be miserable in solidarity with both Upper and Lower Slobbovia.