Obamacare has completely trapped the Democrats on fiscal policy. In order to pay for Obamacare’s trillions of dollars in new spending, they had to raise taxes by $500 and raid Medicare by another $500 billion. As a result, all the low-hanging revenue and spending fruit are already gone. As even The Washington Post's Ezra Klein admits, the Democrats must now argue for higher taxes, and not just on the wealthy. In order to pay for all their entitlement programs, the middle class is going to have to pay more, too. But Ezra can admit this because he doesn’t have to win elections; Democrats in public offices do. That is the reason you haven’t seen a Democratic budget since Obamacare became law and it is the reason you will not see another one till at least 2013.
From The Washington Examiner re Paul Ryan's [why can't he run for president?] article in WSJ about democrats' truancy viz passing a budget. This was exactly my complaint viz Obamacare two years ago - forget arguing whether in and of itself it was good policy or not - the real problem was that in order to pay for the monstrosity you would have to suck up fiscal resources that were desperately required elsewhere. I'm guessing if you asked liberals what, if forced to choose one, was the greater good a gov't could give its people, a vibrant economy or universal health care, a shocking number of them would without hesitation say the latter. Idiots.
