“We are poised for a good year, if we make smart decisions.”
This is the stage Obama needs to set: That the economy is doing well, but it will tank if the GOP won’t do as I say. Actually, the economy is set to be meh in 2013. Just like it was in 2012. And in 2011. And in 2010. And in the second half of 2009, when the Great Recession officially ended.
The next part of his intro was dedicated to the $2.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next ten years he’s already made.
Excuse me while I laugh until I cry and then back again.
Those “cuts” included just kind of assuming the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would go on forever, and then counting the “savings” as “spending cuts” when they didn’t. Obama is still also counting more than $700,000,000,000 in cuts to Medicare — which will be spent on ObamaCare. That’s not a cut; that’s moving IOUs from one pocket to the other while telling everyone about all the new money you found.
Fact is, Federal spending is up about 25% on Obama’s watch, to more than 24% of the economy. And he has no intention — none — of bringing it down. The real fight is over how to pay for it, and that means the middle class (or what’s left of it) is next on the chopping block.
I’ll check back in later if we get any good questions from the White House Press Corps.
Thanks for watching so I won’t have to. I throw up a little in my mouth whenever I hear his voice.
The greatest single obstacle to American success in this day and age is the Executive veto. The Congress won’t always have a majority of my liking, but basically having it able to legislate without one man trying to impose his own personal beliefs on it will reflect the will of the people and will force the people to think in terms of policy, not in terms of the man behind the policy.
The Big Lie that Obama and the Left are trying to sell is that “not raising the debt limit means the US can’t pay it’s bills”.
That is a lie. Obama and the Left know it’s a lie. The media know it’s a lie.
Obama, the Left, and the media (I digress) also know that most Americans don’t know that current tax revenues are sufficient ti service the debt and pay pensioners.
Obama and the Left need to be called on the Big Lie.
No, it’s not a lie.
Just because you WISH that the debt ceiling worked the other end of the problem, doesn’t mean that it does.
You just WISH that you could use it as a threat without destroying the economy.
If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.
Washington will take in about $2.4 trillion in taxes, fees, etc. Its debt obligation is, in comparison, a measly $246 billion.
In other words, we can cover the interest on our debt ten times over. And, thanks to the 14th Amendment, the Treasury Secretary is required to pay the interest before he writes checks for anything else. It is, I believe, the only constitutionally-mandated spending.
In other other words, we aren’t going to default, and the President is flat-out lying when he says we will.
I notice that you’re taking a line of being much more sure of that than even the Heritage foundation is selling.
from heritage.org
So, really then it’s whichever Democrat ends up in Tim Geithner’s old chair who’s holding the nation hostage.
I haven’t heard the press conference yet, but nbc is reporting that Obama himself seems to be saying that interest payments will be the first priority.
Sooo. How happy will you be with the results you’re going to get when the OTHER stuff isn’t paid for?
So you must be suggesting that obama would choose to deliberately default, even though there is enough income to pay the debt by a factor of 10.
That sounds about right
No, weo. “Default” means default on the bond payments. If we keep paying the bonds but not social security we’re not in “default” in that sense.
Apparently we will avoid the disaster of our interest rates being forced up forever and never being able to pay back our debt, which is a possible result of default.
Ok, lets say you’re right and default is off the table.
You fail to raise the debt ceiling and social security and medicare payments stop instead of interest payments.
Soooo, you lose the next election because the GOP’s base of elderly people either hate you or died out in the cold with no medicine.
Good planning!
that would be obama’s decision wouldn’t it?
He would allow senior citizens to starve and die from untreated illnesses, rather than put his funding for solar energy boondoggles on hold and stop sprinkling around his other payoffs to thugs.
That sounds about right as well.
It would be particularly odious since he just imposed his stealth 2% fica tax increase. You know, the highly regressive tax that everybody has been complaining about since they got their first paychecks of the year. The tax that slams the working poor who all voted for the criminal.
It’s congress’ vote, not Obama’s.
People won’t forget that.
It sounds like you don’t want them to vote to pay the bills, you just want to be sure that the blame for welshing on your obligations is placed on someone else.
People like you will be remembered for your lack of maturity. You will be remembered in the next election.
Feckless Won ran up a $5T tab. And now he’s asking them to sign the check.
I say no. Make sure you do not forget who signs the checks – apparently Feckless Won does not always remember.
Dude, you are the Low-Information voter Obama is targeting with the Big Lie.
I know, it hurts when you find out your hero is nothing but a liar and demagogue…but it is what it is.
What I seem to be finding out is that his strategy is to act like the only adult in the room and let your party shit itself without falling to your level even once.
You have the gun in your own mouth and you keep pretending you’re threatening someone else because you’re not mature enough to face the fact that you can’t win without acting like an adult yourself.
as for “low information” I just listened to his press conference, and I can tell by your post that you didn’t.
Here it is: http://youtu.be/7WQUHe2kINM
“We are not a dead-beat nation.”
We don’t need to watch this press conference, all the late night TV writers are watching to pick up the comedy gold.
““We are poised for a good year, if we make smart decisions.””
Given that the voters didn’t make a smart decision last November, we aren’t going to be poised for a good year, or four.
Since we’re going toward shutdown, tell me again why you didn’t let the sequester happen?
Apparently you just want to force the issue so that we pay money for bullets but not give our elders back the money they saved nor pay the medicine we promised them – ie. the Republican party is doing what Jesus would do!
Heh heh.
Are you stupid or just high?
of course we’re a deadbeat nation, the cars and planes just haven’t been repossessed yet. Congress needs to say “no increase, live within your means, we played the game on tax increases, now give us a budget that works within the income you have, and live with it”, then recess and wait for the call. And yes, I am simple-minded, but this isn’t brain surgery, just that to be a politician, I think they all go to this super secret hospital and have their balls cut off.
“Obama said he was willing to consider future deficit cuts, but only if they are done independently from a vote to raise the $16.4 trillion debt limit.”
Yeah right! He’ll contemplate cutting spending as seriously as I am about cutting off my arm – either arm.
You’ll notice that the Republicans want to shut down the government without proposing any specific spending cuts because:
1) they know that the spending cuts they really want, the public really DOESN’T want. Therefore they’re trying to blackmail the whole county just to force the Democrats to suggest those cuts so the Democrats can take the blame.
2) any spending cuts that the public might support, Obama would likely agree to, and the actual goal is not to cut spending but to hurt the Democratic party. The last thing you want is an agreement now.
I have to admire so much delusion being packed into such a few lines.
Obama wants no spending cuts, save in the military. He has never proposed any; for that matter, he has never passed a budget. He wants spending increases—in everything except the gutted military.
Shutting down his mad spree, which is abetted by the leader of the Senate, is the only way to get spending cuts addressed at all.
Ok, go for it, suggest spending cuts that won’t have effects as bad as that sequester that had your party too scared to allow it.
Go on.
Not my job, honey chile. But since you ask:
We could abolish the Department of Education and the EPA outright, and the National Endowment for the Arts; the “lifeline phone” program would go back to being single landlines instead of an Obamaphone™ bribery scheme; set actual budgets at 2008 levels for federal welfare of all sorts (EBT, Medicare, Medicaid) which would necessitate austerity in the departments to eliminate the rampant fraud which currently plague them, and strict justification for any expansion; get rid of all “green energy” subsidies; abolish all the “Muslim outreach” aspects of NASA.
That would do for a start. Then, having cleared away some small portion of the clutter, we could look at some of the other price supports and subsidies, and get back to being a constitutional republic.
Oh—and repeal Obamacare. Immediately.
You’re right, it’s not your job, it’s congress’ job and your party doesn’t actually feel like doing it as I said.
And you laid out a bunch of bullshit that has no effect on the deficit except for your odd plan that we spend on welfare as if the financial crisis and recession hadn’t happened and there were no more people who get that money now then when they still had jobs. Though I’m not even sure that money is significant to the budget except perhaps Medicaid for the very poor and their children. I take it you’re ready to end Medicaid. Wanna sell that to the American people? Are you ready for that?
And Medicare, are you ready to tell seniors that we no longer cover surgery or medicines they need? … did you count Social Security by the way?
And I won’t even take the silly bait on crap like eliminating the EPA. Enjoy your new Bopals, your uncleaned up toxic sites, your new Love Canals etc etc.
Of course you won’t engage; if you did, you’d have to recognize that the out-of-control EPA is one of the greatest drags on the economy today. We don’t need it. If we need something similar to what its original mission was, we can start it from scratch; in the meantime, the EPA as it exists today should be 86′d as quickly as possible.
Yes, we spend on welfare as if the recession hadn’t happened. Aren’t you aware that not only more people than ever are on EBT cards, but that the cards are now recorded as being used not only for food, but for liquor, tobacco, tattoos, and nail salon visits? Sorry; not the purpose of the program. Back in the ’70s, you couldn’t even buy toilet paper with food stamps; it had to not only be food, but American-produced food, since the original purpose of food stamps was a form of agricultural price support. That would put a crimp in the artsy hipsters of New York living high on their EBT cards, but tough.
Entitlements are the largest drag on the federal dollar. Are you aware of that? That means that cutting welfare in all its forms is utterly essential if there is to be some sort of fiscal sanity restored to the government. Does that mean cutting off seniors from Medicare that they were brought to rely on? Of course not—Paul Ryan addressed this during the campaign. You cut prospective benefits of people not yet at retirement age, to reduce the looming deficit, and you cut the current budgets because they are rife with waste and fraud—then go to work rooting out the waste and fraud. You are in favor of rooting out waste and fraud, aren’t you?
By the way—leaving aside that Love Canal was overblown, didn’t it occur on the EPA’s watch? Doesn’t that argue that the EPA doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do?
“By the way—leaving aside that Love Canal was overblown, didn’t it occur on the EPA’s watch? Doesn’t that argue that the EPA doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do?”
It’s odd that people on the right lock-step to an argument as bad as “in the past we had environmental protections that weren’t strong enough to keep our neighborhoods and children safe therefore we should have no protection at all from now on”
Arguments that dumb do answer my question “how can anyone be stupid enough to think that Glen Beck could run a university”?
You seem incapable of following a logical point, Josh. You might want to have that looked at.
Point one: if Love Canal occurred on the EPA’s watch, then the EPA was incapable of doing its job. And it’s gotten worse, what with trying to declare water a pollutant and all. So get rid of it.
Point two: If the EPA is not only useless (as it is) but grotesquely overreaching (as it is) then the thing to do is get rid of it and—if necessary—replace it with something else that works better, having learned from the error that was the EPA.
What you seem incapable of wrapping your mind around is that there is no compelling reason to keep the EPA. We got along for most of our history without it. If we need something that fulfills the function it was supposed to perform, but doesn’t—and that’s not necessarily true—then we can make something better from the ground up.
I find it interesting that Josh Scholar is such a terrified little homunculus as to believe that abolishing the EPA would of necessity leave the poor citizen with “no protection” from those big, bad corporations which apparently live only to poison the unsuspecting while they sleep.
It was not, IIRC, the EPA which addressed Love Canal, but a class-action lawsuit. The courts, last time I checked, were still functioning, and laws against poisoning the air and land are still in effect. What does the federal agency do, save pass unending regulations to enhance its reach and eat its way through a portion of—I would say “the federal budget,” but Obama has never passed one—the Treasury receipts?
All Josh can do when asked to justify this waste of federal money—which means his money too, assuming he pays taxes—is hop up and down on his dungheap screaming about Glenn Beck, who (last I checked) has nothing to do with the operation of the federal government.
Buzz
I applaud your patience with Josh. But it’s pointless to argue with Low Information Americans.
http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/hjackson/BriefingPaper41%20-%202011DebtLimitImpasse.pdf
Last time the Treasury said that it doesn’t have the authority to prioritize debts. It is required to pay in a first-in first-out manner.
Ie, default and ruin here we come!