Well, pros and cons if you’re fiscally conservative that is.

I was starting a round up of opinions on Speaker John Boehner’s debt-ceiling deal, but I’ll instead avoid the common solution of the very political class we’re discussing by not attempting to foolishly reinvent the wheel — others, such as this round up by Guy Benson, have already done it for us.

Organizations in favor: US Chamber of Commerce, Americans for Tax Reform

Organizations opposed: Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, Heritage Action

Politicians in favor: Allen West, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, James Lankford

Politicians opposed: Rand Paul, Jim Jordan, Jason Chaffetz, Jim DeMint, Lindsey Graham (Also, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, et al).

Now, that is an interesting list of strange bedfellows, is it not? It’s also quite noteworthy to see how the Obama Democrats are clearly opposing the Boehner plan. More of that, and whether or not to take it at face value, momentarily.

A few other noteworthy points and statements come from former Sen. Fred Thompson, Rep. Paul Ryan, and the editors of the WSJ. Each of them sees it as a critical first step, a way to keep momentum into the 2012 elections, and executes tangible spending cuts all without raising a single tax.

The downside is obvious — at the end of the day, no matter which plan we’re taking into account the trillion dollar savings are enacted over 10 years, which really means only hundred-billion dollar savings every year, all the while deficit spending is nonetheless occurring. In other words, as has been noted earlier this month, no matter which plan you back we’re really only talking about reducing the level of spending, not actually reducing spending. To steal another’s analogy, were you broke and bought a Toyota instead of a Mercedes, you’d still be $20-grand in the hole while Congress was congratulating you on saving $60-grand for not buying the Mercedes. It’s faux savings.

However, that doesn’t mean the better option is to go all in, here now, when controlling just one house of one branch of government, and pray when the chips fall the public blames Obama instead of the Republicans. (Fred Thompson writes a lot about the odds of that in his piece).

The alternative — failure to pass Boehner’s plan — could mean Sen. Harry Reid’s plan, which while likewise does not raise taxes, doesn’t really have tangible spending cuts — rather they’re all hypothetical lip service with vague corrections for “waste, fraud and abuse” and with undefined promises of future spending cuts combined with the natural savings via troop reductions that were already scheduled in Iraq and Afghanistan. Oh, yeah, and the gamble that the public will blame Obama instead of Republicans might detonate in the faces of the Republicans. It could work, but maybe not. Thompson strongly advises:

“Is this the best deal we could have obtained?” you might ask. I suggest that you don’t run the risk of finding out.

Having said that, I was completely leaning towards those who suggest we take Boehner plan and declare victory until I read this insight quoted in Guy Benson’s commentary. It will give you pause:

Another interesting anti-Boehner plan argument I’ve heard is that if the credit agencies are going to downgrade us anyway, any plan that passes will be blamed for its failure.  If it happens to be the Boehner plan (and its admittedly paltry cuts), President Obama can come out and pound the desk and insist that because of GOP stubbornness on “revenues,” the political system was stuck supporting a bill that didn’t solve the problem (unlike, he’ll say, his non-existent plan). [note, Benson also cites the CBO rescoring Boehner's plan as far less spending level cuts as advertised, but I would wager that they'll rewrite this and fix it by the time of vote].

Well, they don’t call it poker for nothing. It’s almost impossible to predict how this thing will go (and those who claim to know are either arrogant or lying), but even with that final strategic prediction above, I still leaning pro-Boehner because I think the odds of Republicans shooting themselves in the foot by becoming too cute by half with “what ifs” and “supposes” is greater than taking the smaller but significant victory of spending level cuts without tax increases.

Then again by morning I might change my mind…

Obama’s rhetorical floundering is the sound of a bewildered politician trying to be heard over the long, withdrawing roar of ebbing faith in a failing model of governance. From Greece to California, with manifestations in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Illinois and elsewhere, this model is collapsing. Entangled economic and demographic forces are refuting the practice of ever-bigger government financed by an ever-smaller tax base and by imposing huge costs on voiceless future generations.

Richard Miniter, a Forbes columnist, is right: “Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev.” Beneath the tattered, fading banner of reactionary liberalism, Obama struggles to sustain a doomed system. Democrats’ dependency agenda — swelling the ranks of government employees, multiplying government-subsidized industries, enveloping ever-more individuals in the entitlement culture — is buckling under an intractable contradiction: It is incompatible with economic growth sufficient to create enough wealth to feed the multiplying tax eaters.

– George Will.

This week Rep. Allen West (R-FL) officially apologized for an e-mail he sent belittling Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla) — or did he? Both parties are now denying the apology.

To be honest, I did read West’s e-mail rebuke of Wasserman-Schultz and it was indeed over the top. But that’s not the story here. The bigger story regards blatant bias and hypocrisy by the mainstream media and Democratic Party (these are of course redundant terms).

A few days ago House Democratic women called for a rebuke of Rep. Allen West (R-Fla) for his “sexist” verbal insults against Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

But, ironically, and laughably, this came after days of saturation coverage that questioned if Republican Minnesota presidential candidate Rep. Michelle Bachmann has what it takes to be president because — drum roll — she reportedly suffers from migraine headaches!

Naturally there’s a better chance of Barack Obama switching parties and adopting the economic principles of Adam Smith than there is these same House Democratic women to likewise come to the defense of unfair and sexist attacks against Republican women like Michelle Bachmann.

Worse, the media’s criticism appears to be, “You can’t be president, honey, you’ve got a headache.”

Where’s the outrage over the media’s “historic and systemic” sexism from Reps. Gwen Moore (Wis.), Lois Capps (Calif.), Jackie Speier (Calif.), Donna F. Edwards (Md.) and Carolyn B. Maloney (N.Y.)?

Once more, like the standard of racism, the Democratic standard of what is or is not sexism applies to only one party – theirs.

Lately I’ve been bothered over how much conservative pundits seem to surrender ground when fiscal liberals argue to raise taxes or attack the 2003 Bush tax cuts as somehow being the cause of the current debt crisis (a ridiculous notion, as I’ll demonstrate).

The opposition generally misunderstands the economic argument, and confuses the facts. As one brilliant leader — Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan — once coined: you’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.

Thus, the summation:

Let’s say someone makes $50k and the IRS taxes that person 0%. How many dollars in revenue will the IRS take in from that person? $0. Now let’s say that the IRS takes that same person 100%. How many dollars in revenue will the IRS take in from that person? The answer is actually also $0, because nobody would bother working — or at least not bother reporting their earnings as required by law — if another is going to take 100% from them.

What I’ve just demonstrated is that tax rates affect future spending and investment habits.

This also underscores the only two problems with the 2003 Bush tax cuts — first, they were phased in and gradually increased over a period of 10 years, rather than all at once, and second, they were built to sunset after 10 years. This means that businesses were hedging their bets on spending and investment habits because they had no control over who might control politics and taxation years ahead.

And yet despite this hedging and unrealized potential the Bush tax cuts yielded record level tax revenues from the IRS, in part because the tax cuts positively affected spending and investment behavior, the economy grew and the IRS yielded record revenue from that growth (tax revenue from 2003 to 2007 was the biggest four-year increase in U.S. history). This was no surprise to those who had studied the same occurrences — massive tax revenue increases — after tax cuts by Presidents Coolidge, Kennedy and Reagan.

This also demonstrates that there exists a perfect point, albeit difficult to locate, where you can both maximize tax revenue and simultaneously allow individuals and businesses to keep their earnings and flourish (also known as the Laffer Curve).

Thus, liberals who argue that conservative’s only solution is to cut taxes miss the point — you cut or raise taxes only to change behavior and locate that perfect happy medium, not to raise revenue in itself. Revenue is only raised as a result of a growing economy.

Conversely, once your tax rates become too high — and “too high” is relative to the state of the economic — people stop spending and investing, the economy shrinks and your tax revenues are reduced. Worse, about 75% of all businesses in the U.S., including many LLCs and corporations, are taxed under the individual income tax rather than the corporate income tax — which is why the individual income tax rate is so important.

Finally, inflation means that more people (and businesses) creep into those higher tax brackets over time. This is why the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was designed in 1970 for just 155 people, now affects 4.5 million American filers due to its failure to index for inflation. That is a gross distortion of intent.

Liberals also fail to understand that what we have is not a tax revenue problem but a spending problem.

Indeed, were we to tax those making $250,000 at 100% we would still not put a small dent into our national debt — even if you really did yield 100% from them rather than the 0% you’d yield after they hid all their earnings.

Just yesterday I posted that the Obama cult demonstrates an increasing disconnect from and disregard of economics, but this example of disrespecting the American public takes the cake.

[Associated Press] Secretary Steven Chu came out swinging Friday against a House bill that would repeal a 2007 federal law effectively outlawing older forms of incandescent bulbs—an effort at energy conservation that has inflamed a wide swath of Americans who don’t care for the more expensive alternatives.

In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Chu said the more-efficient bulbs required would save consumers money over the life of the product, even if the up-front price is higher.

“We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money,” he said.

Talk about the nanny state run amok. Sec. Chu is going to have to point out to us which section of the U.S. Constitution empowers the government to judge what private spending is or is not “wasting” money, and what gives them the power to trump decisions by individual consumers.

Not to mention, I’ve owned my fair share of these mercury-laden “efficient” bulbs and found them lacking – many times the price of typical incandescents yet having lasted not much longer.

A common definition of hubris is when panels of unelected bureaucrats believe they can make better economic decisions than 300 million consumers in the marketplace. But worse, not only are our they not Constitutionally empowered, but their expertise is typically incorrect and filled with unintended consequences.

Finally, I think this retort by Mark Steyn on Team Obama’s hypocrisy is great.

More to the point, I wonder if Secretary Chu has any idea how stupid this argument sounds from an administration that has wasted more of other people’s money than anybody else on the planet. Secretary Chu and his colleagues took a trillion dollars of “stimulus” and, for all the stimulating it did, might as well have given it in large bills to Charlie Sheen to snort coke off his hookers’ bellies with. (In my weekend column, I touch on only the most lurid and outrageous of the government’s many smart investment decisions: its use of stimulus dollars to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry.)

Chu on that come election day.

Depressing. Larry Kudlow has an honestly blunt assessment of Washington bureaucrats and finds at the end of the day, they’re going to spend your money. Even when they tell you they’re cutting spending they’re still spending.

[Paul] Ryan’s [budget] is of course a couple of trillion dollars lower than Obama’s over the next ten years. But what do they both have in common? They both go up. As in spending more, not less. As in, roughly $40 trillion to $45 trillion more. That’s a whole lot of taxpayer money, folks.

Now why is this? It’s because of something called the “current services baseline,” which includes population and inflation increases built into the budget. Entitlements have their own formulas.

So when you hear a politician tell you they’re cutting spending, they’re actually referring only to reducing the growth of spending. Rarely, if ever, do they actually reduce the level of spending.

Think of it this way: You’re out car shopping and thinking about buying a $100,000 Mercedes. That’s your target. But then you decide to forego the Mercedes and opt for a $20,000 Chevy instead. Well, guess what? Congress would score that as an $80,000 budget cut. Huh? We all know that it’s actually a $20,000 budget increase.

And Democrats once argued that the Bushies were out of touch…?

“[ABC News] The average American does not view the economy through the prism of GDP or unemployment rates or even monthly jobs numbers,” [White House senior adviser David] Plouffe said. “People won’t vote based on the unemployment rate, they’re going to vote based on: ‘How do I feel about my own situation? Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?’”

Now maybe that was Mr. Poluffe’s ham-handed attempt at channeling his inner Ronald Reagan (who once quipped a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, a depression when you lose yours). But given the state of the economy and the number of missteps and shoe eating the Obama Democrats have done of late on the subject one can only extrapolate that these guys just. don’t. get. it.

Could you imagine the media uproar there’d have been if a Bush senior adviser had ever said something this stupid? It’d be reiterated for weeks on every punditry and cable news show there is.

“If you collect that oil tax and the corporate-jet tax for the next 50 years, you will not yet have offset Obama’s deficit spending for February 2011.” — Charles Krauthammer.

Here’s Mark Steyn:

The president has a point about “tax breaks.” We have too many. And on the scale of the present tax code that’s a dagger at the heart of one of the most basic principles of free societies — equality before the law. But, of course, the president is not opposed to exemptions and exceptions and special privileges on principle: After all, he’s issued — what is it now? — over a thousand “waivers” for his own Obamacare law. If you knew who to call in Washington, maybe you got one. If you didn’t, tough.

But that’s the point. Big Government on America’s unprecedented money-no-object scale will always be profoundly wasteful (as on that Williamsburg flight), stupid (as at the TSA), and arbitrary (as in those waivers). But it’s not republican in any sense the Founders would recognize. If (like Obama) you’re a lifetime member of the government class, you can survive it. For the rest, it ought to be a source of shame to today’s Americans that this will be the first generation in U.S. history to bequeath its children the certainty of poorer, meaner lives — if not a broader decay into a fetid swamp divided between a well-connected Latin American–style elite enjoying their waivers and a vast downwardly mobile morass. On Independence Day 2011, debt-ridden America is now dependent, not on far-off kings but on global bond and currency markets, which fulfill the same role the cliff edge does in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. At some point, Wile looks down and realizes he’s outrun solid ground. You know what happens next.

That’s all, folks!

Below is a review by George Will of the book Reckless Endangerment — written by a housing finance expert and by a N.Y. Times columnist, no less.

The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act pressured banks to relax lending standards to dispense mortgages more broadly across communities. In 1992, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston purported to identify racial discrimination in the application of traditional lending standards to those, Morgenson and Rosner write, “whose incomes, assets, or abilities to pay fell far below the traditional homeowner spectrum.”

In 1994, Bill Clinton proposed increasing homeownership through a “partnership” between government and the private sector, principally orchestrated by Fannie Mae, a “government-sponsored enterprise” (GSE). It became a perfect specimen of what such “partnerships” (e.g., General Motors) usually involve: Profits are private, losses are socialized.

There was a torrent of compassion-speak: “Special care should be taken to ensure that standards are appropriate to the economic culture of urban, lower-income, and nontraditional consumers.” “Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor.” Government having decided to dictate behavior that markets discouraged, the traditional relationship between borrowers and lenders was revised. Lenders promoted reckless borrowing, knowing they could off­load risk to purchasers of bundled loans, and especially to Fannie Mae. In 1994, subprime lending was $40 billion. In 1995, almost one in five mortgages was subprime. Four years later such lending totaled $160 billion.

As housing prices soared, many giddy owners stopped thinking of homes as retirement wealth and started using them as sources of equity loans — up to $800 billion a year. This fueled incontinent consumption.

Under [James A.] Johnson, an important Democratic operative, Fannie Mae became, Morgenson and Rosner say, “the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world.” Its power derived from the unstated certainty that the government would be ultimately liable for Fannie’s obligations. This assumption and other perquisites were subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worth an estimated $7 billion a year. They retained about a third of this.

Morgenson and Rosner report that in 1998, when Fannie Mae’s lending hit $1 trillion, its top officials began manipulating the company’s results to generate bonuses for themselves. That year Johnson’s $1.9 million bonus brought his compensation to $21 million. In nine years, Johnson received $100 million.

Fannie Mae’s political machine dispensed campaign contributions, gave jobs to friends and relatives of legislators, hired armies of lobbyists (even paying lobbyists not to lobby against it), paid academics who wrote papers validating the homeownership mania, and spread “charitable” contributions to housing advocates across the congressional map.

By 2003, the government was involved in financing almost half — $3.4 trillion — of the home-loan market. Not coincidentally, by the summer of 2005, almost 40 percent of new subprime loans were for amounts larger than the value of the properties.

Morgenson and Rosner find few heroes, but two are Marvin Phaup and June O’Neill. These “digit-heads” and “pencil brains” (a Fannie Mae spokesman’s idea of argument) with the Congressional Budget Office resisted Fannie Mae pressure to kill a report critical of the institution.

“Reckless Endangerment” is a study of contemporary Washington, where showing “compassion” with other people’s money pays off in the currency of political power, and currency. Although Johnson left Fannie Mae years before his handiwork helped produce the 2008 bonfire of wealth, he may be more responsible for the debacle and its still-mounting devastations — of families, endowments, etc. — than any other individual. If so, he may be more culpable for the peacetime destruction of more wealth than any individual in history.