“Obama Cites Rising Gas Prices As Reason To Extend Payroll Tax Cut”

Protein Wisdom:

Yes, I know. We’ve entered Kafka’s world, only with “Gossip Girls” and “Glee” to keep us a bit more distracted.

But we get the government we deserve, I suppose.

Yes we did!:

President Barack Obama listed rising gas prices as among the many reasons to extend the payroll tax cut Tuesday, flanked by individuals the White House promoted as being affected by $40 per paycheck the average American would lose if the tax cut is not extended at the end of February.

The payroll tax funds Social Security. Cutting the tax would reduce funding to Social Security by $119 billion over the next year, on top of the $105 billion reduced from funding in 2011.

While Republican lawmakers have expressed plans to vote for a full-year extension to the tax cut, Obama told his audience Tuesday at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington that they must put pressure on Congress.

“Congress needs to extend that tax cut – along with vital insurance lifelines for folks who’ve lost their jobs during this recession – and they need to do it now, without drama and without delay,” Obama said. “No ideological sideshows to gum up the works. No self-inflicted wounds. Just pass this middle-class tax cut. Pass the extension of unemployment insurance. Do it before it’s too late, and I will sign it right away.”

House Republicans sought to extend the payroll tax cut for a full year in December. However, they agreed to a Senate Democratic proposal to extend it just for the first two months of 2012.

[...]

“Allowing this tax cut to expire would make people’s lives harder right now,” Obama said. “It would make their choices more difficult. It would be $40 less for groceries to feed your kids; it would be $40 less for the medications you depend on; $40 less to cover bills and the rent; $40 less to take care of an elder parent, or to donate to a church or a charity.

“And when gas prices are on the rise again – because as the economy strengthens, global demand for oil increases – and if we start seeing significant increases in gas prices, losing that $40 could not come at a worse time,” Obama said. “One local entrepreneur named Thierry – where’s Thierry? He’s right here.

“He told us that $40 would cover the gas that gets him to his day job, or, alternatively, the Internet service his small business depends on. So he’d have to start making a choice – do I fill up my gas tank to get to my work, or do I give up my entrepreneurial dream. ‘Forty dollars,’ he wrote, ‘means a heck of a lot,’” the president added.

CNSNews.com reported last month that under Obama, the price of gas climbed by 83 percent.

This is the kind of staples price inflation Sarah Palin predicted a year or so back, and for which she was mocked, recall — just as she was mocked by the more serious political players for her simplistic calls to “drill, baby, drill.”

And yet, here we are: if we’re to believe Obama, rising gas prices are causing a ripple effect throughout the economy. Which, I wonder if some of the leftwing “fact checkers” will take him on for that assertion as forcibly as they did Governor Snowbilly.

Anyway, add to this new-found concern over rising gas prices ObamaCo’s recent refusal to allow the Keystone XL pipeline project (as well his EPA and Interior’s gambits to block drilling, exploration, and emerging oil and gas recovery technologies) — and the much publicized (on the right, at least) suggestion by Obama that energy costs under his stewardship must “necessarily skyrocket” — and we have a rather perfect portrait of the Leftist ideologue who uses his power (via the administrative state, who remains out of the reach of voters) to create crises in order that he can promote “fixes” to the crises he himself has created.

And those fixes — surprise! — always seem to involve more government, more government spending, and (in this particular case) Trojan “tax cuts” that are really only cuts to the Social Security insurance fund these same Democrat Party leaders claim to be protecting from the very people trying to fix the program to make it sustainable.

It’s all so cynical. And dishonest. And dazzling in its audacity and scope of dishonesty. Surreal to watch it play out.

Kafkaesque.

Which brings us full circle.

And yet we’re told by both side of the establishment that someone like Sarah Palin doesn’t have the credentials or grooming to govern.

Which, I don’t know about the rest of you: but my ass is hurting from all the polished political tools who’ve presumed to have my back. Frankly, I’d prefer someone who squeaks a bit more. So at least I can hear them coming.