Obama on the Debt Ceiling "negotiations:" A tax by any other name...

Ah, the irony. The sweet, sweet, unintended irony!

I've said this a bunch of times out loud and in print, but had despaired of ever seeing anyone important and well-connected saying something like this out loud. This is one of the great shared secrets of power. Not all taxation is called taxation.

Remarks by the President on the Status of Debt Ceiling Negotiations | The White House:

"Keep in mind, if we don’t do that, if we don’t come to an agreement, we could lose our country’s AAA credit rating, not because we didn’t have the capacity to pay our bills -- we do -- but because we didn’t have a AAA political system to match our AAA credit rating.

And make no mistake -– for those who say they oppose tax increases on anyone, a lower credit rating would result potentially in a tax increase on everyone in the form of higher interest rates on their mortgages, their car loans, their credit cards. And that’s inexcusable."

The way I'd put it is that a "tax" is an additional fee, charge, expense or transactional cost that you cannot avoid and must pay in order to conduct the ordinary business of life.

And this is absolutely a tax. Worse yet, it's a tax that rewards nobody but banks - it essentially will create a condition where you - and you and you and you - will have to pay more for everything, and none of that additional money will achieve a single damn thing.

Which, from the viewpoint of a middleman, is the perfect tax. Getting an extra share of something in return for nothing at all.

Now do please realize that the people that brought us to this passage are the people who say, loudly and insistantly, that "all taxation is theft."

But rather than eliminate taxation, they've figured out how to privatize it - by compelling the government to mandate theft.

This compellingly illustrates the compound idiocy of the Tea-Party caucus, for I regret to say, for the majority of them, there isn't a shred of nudge-nudge wink-wink. They aren't actually trying to "put one over" on the American People. They really think that there is a difference between having to pay Peter and having no choice but to pay Paul.

And they think it's "freedom" when you have to pay Paul twice as much to do what Peter did before, for results that are at best half as good.

The sole task of good government is to do those things that cannot be done cost-effectively in bits and pieces, here and there; to determine standards and provide for the common security and defense.

Well, tanking the economy would be a brilliant stroke of economic warfare, if it were done by an actual enemy of the state. It will do more harm over a longer span of time than, say, popping a nuke over Washington.

So perhaps it might be prudent, at this juncture, to consider that anyone damn fool enough to think that risking the entire economy over a re-election strategy is, in fact, an enemy of the state. In a very real, non-rhetorical, this isn't politics you morons sort of way.