Ryan's Hope
That the president has some remedial math lessons. Paul Ryan writes in the Weekly Standard, quoting then-Senator and new presidential candidate Obama on the politics of division (and he isn't talking the math kind here):

He said that what's stopped us from meeting our nation's greatest challenges is, quote, "the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics - the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems."

I couldn't agree more.

And yet, nearly three years into his presidency, look at where we are now:

Petty and trivial? Just last week, the President told a crowd in North Carolina that Republicans are in favor of, quote, "dirtier air, dirtier water, and less people with health insurance." Can you think of a pettier way to describe sincere disagreements between the two parties on regulation and health care?

Chronic avoidance of tough decisions? The President still has not put forward a credible plan to tackle the threat of ever-rising spending and debt, and it's been over 900 days since his party passed a budget in the Senate.

A preference for scoring cheap political points instead of consensus-building? This is the same President who is currently campaigning against a do-nothing Congress, when in fact, the House of Representatives has passed over a dozen bills to help get the economy moving and deal with the debt, only to see the President's party kill those bills in the do-nothing Senate.

...The tax increases proposed by Senate Democrats and endorsed by the President - when combined with the new taxes in the health-care law, and the President's other tax preferences - would push the top federal tax rate to roughly 50 percent in just 14 months, while doing nothing to promote job creation.

This tax increase on so-called "millionaires and billionaires" would actually constitute a huge tax hike on the nation's most successful small businesses. According to the Tax Foundation, the surtax would hit roughly 35 percent of small-business income.

...As a practical matter, when you try to chase ever-higher spending with ever-higher tax increases, you eventually run into a brick wall of math.

...When you look at the actual math, you quickly realize that the way out of this mess is to combine economic growth with reasonable, responsible spending restraint. Yet neither of these things factors into the President's zero-sum logic.

According to the President's logic, we should give up on trying to reform our tax code to grow the economy and get more revenue that way. Instead, these goals are taking a backseat to the President's misguided understanding of fairness.