Nancy Pelosi says that there’s no more to cut from the budget, “the cupboard is bare.” Harry Reid wants ot get rid of the sequester and restore cuts already made.
And President Obama? He simply doesn’t want to hear about any more budget cuts and is demanding new “investments” in education.
A combination of a little bit of economic growth which brought in more revenue and some modest budget cuts led to a near halving of the federal budget deficit to a little less than $700 billion last year. A nice start. But now the Democrats want to blow that up and go back to spending as usual — or worse.
President Obama told Republicans in Congress that he doesn’t want to hear about additional cuts to government programs after the 16-day shutdown.
The president said the country can afford to make investments in areas like education, and he noted that the shutdown cut into the economy.
“Don’t tell me we can afford to shut down the government, which costs our government billions of dollars, but we can’t afford to invest in our kids,” Obama said at a school in Brooklyn.
“This obsession with cutting for the sake of cutting hasn’t helped our economy grow, it’s held us back,” Obama said.
Standard & Poor’s has estimated that the shutdown took about $24 billion from U.S. economy. Obama blasted “a small group” of House Republicans for causing what he said was a “manufactured crisis.”
Congress now faces a Jan. 15 deadline for funding the government, and a Feb. 7 deadline for raising the debt ceiling.
A House-Senate conference committee will meet next week to begin negotiations on how to handle those deadlines. Both Republican and Democratic leaders have said they are interested in getting rid of the sequester of automatic spending cuts, while downplaying hopes for a “grand bargain” deal that would cut into entitlements and reform the tax code.
Obama said the site of his speech — the Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) in Brooklyn — was an example of the type of program that lawmakers should be investing more tax dollars in. Students at the school graduate with both a high school diploma and an associate degree in computers or engineering.
“We need to redesign more of our high schools so they teach young people the skills required for a high-tech economy,” Obama said.
The president noted that during his tour of the school, he had stopped in on a “real world math” class to meet with students.
“It got me thinking, ‘Is it too late to send Congress here for a remedial course?’ ” Obama quipped.
At the same time, Obama said parties needed to “pull together.”
“We need to work together to grow the economy, not shrink it,” he said.
It should be noted that the $24 billion cost to the economy of the shutdown is about 0.25% of GDP — hardly a backbreaker. Preliminary estimates of what it actually cost government (“billions of dollars” says Obama) is $2-3 billion. Neither figure should be confused with a major calamity.
But then, how can the president and the Democrats bash the opposition and scare the voter if the effects of the shutdown weren’t catastrophic? Simple. Just make stuff up and give it the hard sell.
The Democrats believe a $700 billion budget deficit is acceptable and wish to spend every dime that has gone to deficit reduction in the past two years on new spending schemes — “investments” they call them because they don’t have the political courage to speak plainly about their plans.
It seems pretty clear that any “deal” on the budget will be used to begin another Obama spending spree.
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