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Obama the Fiscal Conservative
This breaking news story of hope and change comes to you directly from the Washington Post.
President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that worrying about the U.S. government’s finances “keeps me awake at night” and the country needed to start planning now to tackle soaring deficits.
Man. I wish we’d had a president like you a couple of months ago.
Oh… wait…
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15 Responses to “Obama the Fiscal Conservative”
Obama is making an effort to reign in some excesses.
Funny how so many so-called “fiscal conservatives” weren't as concerned about deficits when their boy was running them up during a supposedly good economy…I guess they were enjoying their tax cuts geared to the wealthy too much. Unfortunately when you have to pursue stimulus spending when you've already inherited a trillion dollar deficit from the previous administration, deficits will need to be a bit worse before they can get better.
George,
Closing the barn door harder doesn't get the horses back in.
Jesus Christo!?
Would YOU want the guy's job? Have YOU gone noticably much grayer in the last six months?
Lest we forget, he is only a man after all. He has a team but this is one of those Humpty Dumpty moments in US history, courtesy in large part of financial deregualtion and illegal corporate wars paid for by the US grunts/Treasury, where the GOP shattered the eggshell and all the kings horses and men are busy trying to put Humpty back together again. Whaddya know, greed isn't capable of sustaining itself in the long term via the free market after all…S-H-O-C-K-E-R…
..lol.
Give the guy a break. You're as bad as Rush Limbaugh. The liberals now are going to attack him because they cannot shove gay marriage down the country's throat with his help. Traitors. All of you on the extreme fringes should be totally ashamed of what you're doing to this country..
Get behind the president and boost his esteem. We need him fresh and frisky for another 3 years. He's a good man at his heart, not a pit viper like Cheney or Bush et al. The raw material for success is there in him. Idiots who cut him down are just slitting their own throats in the big picture.
PWT–
Ignoring the problems doesn't make them go away.
I welcome Obama's new found interest in fiscal responsibility, but it was only a couple of months ago he was refusing to control earmarks and justifying excessive spending by saying it was necessary for the stimulus. Obama is turning into a Flavor of the Day president. His approach is scattershot and with the exception of health care I don't see much long term vision.
And yes the GOP was no better, that's why fiscal conservatives like me left them. At this point though there is one party and one president currently responsible for the budget going forward, and that's who we should expect to address it.
“Get behind the president and boost his esteem. We need him fresh and frisky for another 3 years. He's a good man at his heart, not a pit viper like Cheney or Bush et al. S-H-A-M-E on anyone who denigrates or undermines the goodhearted leader of any country in crises just to further their own twisted, greedy or petty agendas. For utter shame.. SHAME!“
Is there anyone here from law enforcement who can check and see who has stolen Silhouette's account and find out if she was kidnapped or something? I mean,this can't be the same person who berated us day after day last year about how Barack Obama was a non-native born, muslim, gay drug addict who was throwing man flesh parties in his limo with male prostitutes and how we were damaging… nay D-E-S-T-R-O-Y-I-N-G.. America if anyone here dared vote for him.
DaGoat,
I don't think that is an accurate characterization. Bush dodged that spending bill. It was put together and negotiated for months under his term. So Obama just gets into office, he has 2 wars and a financial crisis, while he is still trying to learn the job and hire his staff. If it were you, would you have waded into that mess and told congress they needed to start from scratch, even if it meant a big fight and a possible government shut down or would you have said, “Screw it. I have more important things to deal with right now”?
I hate the deficits we are running. I hate pork. However, I know that the all the pork barrel projects that were approved in that spending package are a drop in the bucket to the amount of money we spent last year on the Medicare Part D travesty or the Pentagon. I intend to hold him to the fire on reducing overall spending, including and especially ending the wars, reducing the Pentagon budget in general, and smacking the legislature about entitlement spending. But I am not going to blame him for passing on that last budget fight.
Sorry, Jazz, but I'm calling BS on your post. So easy for you guys who voted in all the producers and enablers of our current crisis to criticize Obama for doing exactly what YOUR TEAM started. What if Obama had done no bailouts and let the banking and manufacturing sectors crash and burn? My guess? You'd be criticizing him for creating the second Great Depression, because according to all the economists I've read, cutting government spending in a fiscal crisis is the wrong thing to do. Perhaps you can point me to someone credible who believes what we needed were government cutbacks when the Dow was at half its 2006 level. This crisis is entirely of Republican making. Completely. HERE
During our entire lives, the so-called fiscal conservatives of the GOP have been entirely responsible for the debt Obama inherited
Change in the National Debt, as a yearly percentage of GDP.
Sorted Best-to-Worst.
D:Clinton -0.76 (reduced the debt)
D:Carter -0.70 (reduced the debt)
R:Ford 0.20 (no change)
R:Bush II 0.90 (increased the debt)
R:Reagan 2.31 (increased the debt)
R:Bush I 3.05 (increased the debt)
Now before you try to blame it on the Dem Congress that was in power during part of this, the facts deny that excuse too. For example, if the Dem Congress had not trimmed Reagan's plans to be even more irresponsible, the debt would have been even greater. Ditto with Bush II. He wanted the devastating tax cuts for the rich both increased and made permanent. He wanted to cut capital gains tax to zero, further decreasing federal revenue. He wanted to eliminate estate tax, further reducing federal revenue.
The GOP has been atrocious, and even Republican fiscal experts do not now advocate slashing federal spending at this time. But the GOP did TRY to balk at the bailout, remember? They initially withheld support for the ($750 billion) bank bailout. The very NEXT day, the market plunged 1.3 trillion, costing Americans over twice the bailout amount. The GOP decided not to try for more inaction at that point.
As those of you who have been here for awhile know, I've been adamant for years that our “borrow and spend” binge of gluttony was hurting our future and especially that of future generations. I've been outraged for years while the GOP (curse it to hell) ranted about the “tax and spend” Democrats, while they have for the last 30 years, treated us to a borrow and spend disaster while crowing about how they were “fiscal conservatives.” Now, all of those here, PWT for example and Jazz, voted these bastards into office time and again. They have EXACTLY ZERO credibility as fiscal conservatives. NONE.
Zzzzz thanks your very well thought out response, heck I even checked that I liked it, but I don't agree with you that deferring problems and making them worse was a reasonable way to handle the deficit. Obama ran on a platform that included controlling pork, it is reasonable to expect him to keep his promise. Beyond that he increased spending further and is basing his projections on assumptions that can't be supported by the CBO.
Bush did a bad job on the budget and his funding of the wars outside the budget just makes things worse, but we can't justify Obama's poor performance on fiscal issues by pointing to Bush's poor performance.
DaGoat, “pork” (by which I guess you mean earmarks) is <1% of the budget. Had he cut out every one, His critics would be saying “so what?” Now, of that <1%, probably half are worthy projects, so it's .5%. Either way, we're talking about symbolism, not pragmatism. Now cutting 12% from our health care budget by enacting single-payer, that would be very substantial indeed. But alas, the Republicans (and some Democrats) would rather please their insurance company allies, than actually get something meaningful done.
Speaking of pragmatic, I would take a different approach to foreign policy and actually winning the war against terrorism, including the war in Afghanistan. I would shut off their funding by aggressively reducing our need for foreign oil, and by eliminating their income from illicit drugs. I would legalize all drugs, including especially those derived from opium. By paying Afghanis to produce legal crops and eliminating the market for illegal crops, we would both deprive drug lords of income and befriend Afghani farmers. Unfortunately, there are powerful entrenched special interests and years of government propaganda that will make this simple and effective strategy unworkable from a political standpoint.
I don't think we can make any conclusions yet about “Obama's poor performance,” because he is dealing with a crisis. The actions Obama has taken have apparently halted the panic-induced slide of the markets, which otherwise could have caused many more businesses to fail, increased unemployment, decreased consumer spending, and worsened the crisis. Now some here think that's the way we should have gone, but I wonder if even that would have helped. By killing businesses and reducing employment, the income side of the federal balance sheet would suffer (business and personal income taxes, sales taxes and capital gains taxes), so it's not at all a foregone conclusion that cutting the spending side would improve the “performance” of the economy short term.
I don't think we can make any conclusions yet about “Obama's poor performance,” because he is dealing with a crisis.
Sure we can… he has tripled the deficit, unemployment is still increasing, he is still spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave. Last year our president was fighting a war on terror and trying to prop up buisness.
Now we have a president that is fighting a war on buisness and trying to prop up terrorists. Seems to me that the conclusion is he is a disaster.
“Now cutting 12% from our health care budget by enacting single-payer, that would be very substantial indeed. But alas, the Republicans (and some Democrats) would rather please their insurance company allies, than actually get something meaningful done.”
I'm a conservative and I don't give a damn crap the insurance company allies. They're among the worst when it comes to working the system to screw people. But for crying out loud – the federal government is completely incompetent and atrociously over budget in EVERY health care provider program they administer: Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans, and now we're hearing about the Native American health system. And you want them to take over the ENTIRE COUNTRY? Are you on crack?
Well, now, first, no I'm not on crack. I study this stuff apparently more than you do.
I'll start with TheLid. Obama inherited 80% of his current deficit. Quibble as you wish about whether he could have shaved his 20% to 18%, but the other team is responsible for 4/5 of it. Next, cmon, give me a little deeper thought. The whole budget is published. What specifically do you propose cutting? Huh?
Treen, as I said, the numbers are from THE INSURANCE industry. They admit that Medicare costs 12% less to provide the same service. But wait, Medicare has a MUCH riskier risk pool (the elderly) than the insurance industry. If the government can serve the most expensive population for 12% less than private carriers with a young healthy patient population, that just doesn't seem so bad. So how about some proof that they're so bad? Oh, and you don't think they're competent to send checks to our troops? Because that's all they need to do. Assess the claim. Send the check.
Isn't Obama a magnificent fiscal conservative? In addition to dwarfing Bush's spending and debt, he has worked magic, achieving a one-half per cent savings that was loudly proclaimed and no doubt met with smiles and nods of approval by the gullible suckers out there.
By the way, where's the cost projection(s) for the massive new health care proposal, which currently is the object of a multi-hundred-page bill with over three hundred amendments? [burying face in hands, shaking head at the issue and the fools who find it acceptable]
“Obama the fiscal conservative” [sic] gets more space on this site than the most important issue (more important than health care currently), the financial “reforms” with some sinister aspects to them, or the federalization of GM (propping up the failed dinosaur, paying off the undeserving UAW, threatening all kinds of industrial-policy foolishness in addition, which many are clamoring for, while competing unfairly with private industry in the future). I wonder to what extent the various issues on this site are indicative of the grossly misplaced set of priorities or level of ignorance of the liberal electorate at large currently.