It was a masterstroke which should be recorded as the high point of his presidency.
As I read the advance text of President Obama’s thoughtfully smart proposals to reduce the deficit, some options British Prime Minister Hacker (fictitious) considered for a party political – his first after becoming PM in Yes, Prime Minister — came to mind.
During intensive preparation for his address, Hacker was asked “What is the broadcast to be about?” He responded,
I couldn’t think what he meant for a moment. Obviously the broadcast is to be about me. I explained this to him, and he saw the point entirely. However, he wanted further clarification on one small matter of detail: what exactly was I going to say?
I couldn’t see that his mattered much, but he wanted to know which policies I’d be referring to. I explained that it would be the usual: go forward together, a better tomorrow, tighten our belts, all pull together, healing the wounds, that sort of thing.
He was happy with that, but urged me to consider what I’d say specifically. My first thought was that I’d talk about specifically tightening our belts, healing specific wounds in our society.
But Malcom pressured me to consider saying something new. I’d never considered that
So here’s what President Obama wants us to do:
We have to live within our means, reduce our deficit, and get back on a path that will allow us to pay down our debt. And we have to do it in a way that protects the recovery, and protects the investments we need to grow, create jobs, and win the future.
Following these crystal clear objectives, President Obama expressed dislike for the Republican alternative.
[T]his is a vision that says even though America can’t afford to invest in education or clean energy; even though we can’t afford to care for seniors and poor children, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. Think about it. In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that’s paid for by asking thirty three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs? That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.
Moving right along, President Obama’s specific four step proposal is to
► Save about $750 billion over twelve years. We will make the tough cuts necessary to achieve these savings, including in programs I care about, but I will not sacrifice the core investments we need to grow and create jobs. We’ll invest in medical research and clean energy technology. We’ll invest in new roads and airports and broadband access. We will invest in education and job training. We will do what we need to compete and we will win the future.
► Find additional savings in our defense budget. . . . Over the last two years, Secretary Gates has courageously taken on wasteful spending, saving $400 billion in current and future spending. I believe we can do that again. We need to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness, but conduct a fundamental review of America’s missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world. I intend to work with Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs on this review, and I will make specific decisions about spending after it’s complete.
► Further reduce health care spending in our budget. Here, the difference with the House Republican plan could not be clearer: their plan lowers the government’s health care bills by asking seniors and poor families to pay them instead. Our approach lowers the government’s health care bills by reducing the cost of health care itself.
As to the third specific proposal, President Obama noted that “Already, the reforms we passed in the health care law [AKA ObamaCare] will reduce our deficit by $1 trillion. My approach would build on these reforms. As President Obama spoke, a new poll was released showing support for ObamaCare dropping to just 35%,” while opposition stands at 45 percent, and another 17 percent are neutral. Among seniors, support has dipped below 30 percent for the first time.” His empathetic compassion for the seniors will probably bring them right around.
► The fourth step in our approach is to increase taxes for the filthy rich reduce spending in the tax code. In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. And I refuse to renew them again.
Beyond that, the tax code is also loaded up with spending on things like itemized deductions. And while I agree with the goals of many of these deductions, like homeownership or charitable giving, we cannot ignore the fact that they provide millionaires an average tax break of $75,000 while doing nothing for the typical middle-class family that doesn’t itemize.
Alas, even Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast was less than impressed. After praising President Obama’s masterful job of “eviscerating the GOP budget plan” and slamming “Paul Ryan’s proposed tax breaks for the wealthy,” he complained that “when it came to his blueprint for slashing the deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years, Obama painted in the broadest strokes.”
[B]y limiting his pitch to general themes, by failing to fill in the blanks, he ensured that it will get even messier. Once again, Obama is taking the high rhetorical ground while largely leaving the details to others.
Oh well, President Obama has to be presidential. However, he did articulate a specific way — maybe – to kick the deficit can forward as long as possible with a shovel ready idea. “In early May, the Vice President will begin regular meetings with leaders in both parties with the aim of reaching a final agreement on a plan to reduce the deficit by the end of June.” This is dependent upon someone finding the key to the closet in which Vice President Biden was hidden during his earlier efforts to coordinate clear Administration objectives with the far from clear objectives of the Obstructionist Republicans.
Mr. Miller:
“It was a masterstroke which should be recorded as the high point of his presidency.”
Ummmm, yes…something like that.
Obama, the man who signed the neqr-trillion dollar Porkulus and oversaw, (in his own leisurely way), the Federal takeover of 1/6th of our economy now expects us to embrace him as a born again “Deficit Hawk”?
One could say that this indeed is a historic speech.
A speech that will live long in the annals of political mendacity.
Recapping Presidents speech.
1. A polished 90 year old central socialist platform speech.
2. Some truth.
3. Some misrepresentation of truth.
4. Some outright lies.
5. Ignored ‘core’ issues of causations.
The President’s Plan.
1. Retains a centralized government of power and authority over the people.
2. Retains socialist programs without reform of ‘eligibility’ and benefits.
3. Re-enforces nationalized Obama care.
4. Retains centralized power and authority over the nations private sector economy.
5. Offers no permanency to any solutions rhetoric.
Bottom line.
Neither opponent’s solutions mention the constitution or reforms consistent with the constitutional authority of the government. Neither opponent’s plans offer the means to implement with any permanency, lending any plan to revision and or complete reversal as the results of any given election cycles outcome. This was the typical class warfare socialist speech!
All this ‘crisis’ rhetoric from both sides is nothing more than empty rhetoric and a smoke screen, ignoring the core causations that has brought the country to this point. Now all the intellectuals and political pundits will use all the irrelevant ‘details’ in the opponents ‘plans’ to further manipulate diversions farther away from the core issues.
As I was watching the speech last night I was struck by the same thought. Class warfare. Trying to incite people against the rich.
A little later in the speech the last piece of the puzzle clicked into place for me.
He is not a socialist. HE IS A COMMUNIST!
Translation: We’re in the hole to the tune of $14 trillion, and I’m offering to cut less than 1/15th of that over 12 years, meaning less than 1/150th per year. Basically, I’m not at all serious.
I won’t sacrifice cuts in boondoggles programs like clean energy initiatives (tries desperately not to give a wave to Jeff Imelt), or money to the teachers unions so they can contribute billions to democrat candidates in the future for education (even though you cannot equate more spending on better educated students).
We’ll waste money on invest in airports in democrat congress critters’ backwater districts, because we care about “accessibility” for all, even though maybe a couple of hundred people use that airport every week.
We’ll pay for everyone’s broadband bills, as long as they say they can’t afford it. And while we’re at it, we’ll probably give some kind of tax dodge incentives to the various phone and internet providers who offer subsidized broadband service to their customers. Or maybe we’ll just use that Fairness Doctrine to force internet providers to do whatever we tell them to…
Translation: I just got us into War Number 3, but we’re going to cut more from the defense budget. After all, we just cut $400 billion and they’re still going, so we can probably safely make over half my projected cuts here. It’ll be those idiot white boys from flyover country who will suffer the consequences of being sent to fight without adequate supplies. It’s not like it’ll affect any important people or anything…
In other words, rather than expect patients to, you know, actually pay for the health services they use, we’re going to stick it to those rich doctors and greedy hospitals. It’s not like we’re doing this to people who might actually deserve it, like politicians, Harvard-educated lawyers, or croney-capitalist friends of same.
Like I said, it was a great speech.
Very nice dissection and translation!
It might very well be the high point of his Presidency. One should recognize the variance of meanings that are possible in the reality presented in that sentence.
Ah O’Sputnik’s speech today. Ordinarily one would expect to be in a simians department to experience this much excrement being flung about.
He’s still using the phrase “win the future?” Three times in this speech, I believe.
WTF?
Has anyone thought that 300 million may simply be too unwieldy a figure to effectively govern?
Even Robert E. Lee couldn’t articulate an infinite number of divisions; his biggest army was his biggest failure.
End immigration.
Our gov’t is a deer in the headlights of a massive population and all our new and/or most complaining adults need diapers and massive entitlements to speed them on their way to being the next generation of Jeffersonian physicists with a lot of tattoos.
Our legal system has been overwhelmed for years and new immigrants are about to build the first American shanty towns on public land, steal electricity and crap in a hole, throw the garbage out a window and say, “Whaddya gonna do about it?”
Go to Rio de Janeiro and look at 20% of the population living in 800 shanty towns to see if morons can’t overwhelm a civilization with sheer numbers.
@James May, yes, a number of people have been thinking a long time about the inherent ungovernability of a nation of over 300 million people. Among the names the most familiar might be Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin…. Our nation’s Constitution, if honored, was designed to give us a central government strictly limited to a few necessary functions. Almost every dollar spent by the Federal obscenity today is unconstitutional. Almost all government should be local government. The Federal was to perform only the government functions (like the declaration and prosecution of war) which the states were not better equipped to perform. States were to perform only government functions not better handled at the local level. The most important government in each American’s life was to be the closest to him. Constitutional government is government workable for any population size. Our exceedingly difficult problem is that the Federal obscenity, from its inception, has usurped the rights and powers of the states and of the people in violation of the Constitution which was to have shackled it. The resulting centralization of power into the hands of a scant few corrupt politicians, and abuse of that power by socialists bent on totalitarian control, is the whole story of our current crisis. To solve it, we must extract from D.C. most of the money and power that currently flows there.
By comparison to the problem of cutting our current Federal government to a Constitutional size, illegal immigration is simpler and quite easy to solve. Indeed, it’s been solved, for any American generation with the will to do so. Look up Eisenhower’s successful program to reverse illegal immigration.
One source: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0706/p09s01-coop.html
Always keep in mind that Obama did not write this speech; it was the concoction of a platoon of speech writers whose purpose was: !) to create the impression with liberals and the uncommitted that he is a reasonable pragmatist, moving toward the center and eager to “re”Reach across the aisle”; 2) to reassure those who share his true unwavering dedication to communist ideology that he still adheres to their principles, and is not throwing them under the bus.” Be of stout heart, comrades: I’m only pretending bipartisanship in order to win in 1912. Hold fast to our hope for changing the constitution.”
I get the irony, and it is a great example of rhetorical subterfuge. Whether it was a masterstroke rather than just one more classic example from his long litany of Orwellian double-speak, transparent in its duplicity, and boring even his faithful to sleep, is doubtful. One thing is certain: he made his game plan clear to his opponents.
Dan;
You must have been ecstatic over Obama’s intention to cut the pay of the military in the CONUS by 50%, beginning next payday.
After all, the military has no conflicts within the borders of the U.S. to be involved in. Reduced pay for any troops not involved in any battle, sounds like good fiscal policy.
What would have been the net effect in dollars and cents for this brilliant move?
Not exactly.
According to this report,
Still, it seems better than supporting the
freedom loving“democratic” rebels in Libya and elsewhere – if there are to be suitable rules of engagement, a strategy not phrased in Humpty Dumpty fashion and a meaningful definition of “win.”Obama either has no plan (an incompetent) or his plan is so damaging to our nation that he dare not reveal its details before it has been imposed on us (a traitor). Carter was incompetent, and we got rid of him in four years. LBJ was incompetent, and we got rid of him in four years, too(he declined to stand for a second term). Was Clinton a competent traitor? I think so.
Not liking either of these alternatives, I thought that perhaps Obama is just the figurehead for a criminal gang made up of Democrats in Congress, the thugocracy imported by Obama from Chicago, and assorted Marxists already planted in the Federal bureacracy. If this third possibility is the real answer, Obama will do much damage short term, but he and his fellow gangsters will fall rather rapidly as public outrage continues to swell. Our proper response then is electing the right people in 2012, 2014, and 2016 to fully dismantle every vestige of the Obama legacy.