Rubio: The fiscal cliff exposes “the great hypocrisy of the Left”

Sen. Rubio’s outlook for a 2016 bid is looking pretty darn spiffy, and for a lot more than just the obvious reasons. Even in unscripted and off-the-cuff moments, I think that few of our current pols can talk as great a game on the economy as this guy. Whatever his other faults may be, he is constantly lobbing free-market truth grenades that are reliably simple, approachable, and poignant, and cut through President Obama’s rhetorical loop-de-loops without so much as a stutter.

As Sen. Rubio explains in the Hannity clip below, the scariest thing about our country’s current financial scenario is not the fiscal cliff over which we have lately been dedicating much hemming and hawing; rather, it is the undeniable fact that we have absolutely zero plans for any attempts to actually pay down our $16 trillion in outstanding debt, not to mention the accumulating interest, nor to take care of our tens of trillions more in unfunded liabilities. We are exerting an indecent amount of political energy on merely bringing down our yearly deficit the tiniest bit, and Democrats’ intransigence on sincerely acknowledging the non-sustainability of their agenda, paired with their tactical ploys to keep moving the traditional political center further and further leftward, do not bode well for America.

I’ve never heard President Obama make anything close to the amount of sense Rubio makes in this little segment, with or without a teleprompter. Rock on, Rubio.

Look, it’s not the business owner, directly, that’s going to get impacted. It’s the people that work for them that are going to lose their jobs. They’re going to lose hours, they’re going to lose benefits. The cost of these tax increases will be paid by the workers and the employees of these small businesses. … And here’s the other point, and this really exposes the great hypocrisy of the left. They claim that tax increases have no impact on the economy or how people behave. Well then why are they in favor of cigarette taxes? Why are they in favor of a carbon tax? Why are they in favor, they say, of lowering the corporate tax? Because they recognize that if you tax cigarettes, people will smoke less. They recognize that if you tax carbon people will produce less of it. The more you tax something the less people will do it. And so the bottom line is, it does have an impact.

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