Well, you nailed him there.
I certainly don’t think that Obama’s central campaign theme was cutting spending. Although you’ve caught him saying he will decrease spending, which, to my knowledge, is a one-off statement. (Doesn’t make it right, of course.)
Would you be interested to know how many times that Bush made statements proposing spending cuts, or shall we just agree that Bush talked about it a lot, but ended up increasing spending by a trillion dollars a year?
Actually, Obama is on record as saying that his campaign was basically an opportunity for people to project their desires onto him.
And, as mentioned, he seems to be exempt from the requirement that any of his campaign promises be taken seriously. So he has an opportunity that a Republican would not have - he can do whatever he wants, for a while, and it will be lauded.
But only for a while. He got away with running on no record, and no serious plans for the country. He will be President in a couple of months. Come 2012 - hell, come 2010 - he will have a record, and he and Pelosi and Reid and the Democrats are going to have to run on it, like it or not.
Maybe he will spend his political capital on something worthwhile. But he has two years of good will, max, and he had better get up to speed before then at a job for which he has no background at all, and with a Congress that has spent the last two years doing nothing in particular.
There’s an entitlement crunch coming to go with the bailout. I realize Obama probably won’t be able to bring off any kind of UHC deal, and that no one really will call him to account for it. But how will they react when he is forced to say, “Not only do you not get UHC, you don’t get the huge increases in Medicare and Social Security spending you think you need.”
They used to say Social Security was the third rail of US politics. Bush tried to grab it, and the Dems in Congress stopped him from doing anything - not because they had a better idea, but because they didn’t want a Republican President to be seen as addressing the problem when they couldn’t. OK, now we got Dems in all three branches of the federal government. What’s your excuse this time?
Boy, you got us there, guy! Fer sure, fer sure! Obama’s going to inherit a complete economic meltdown, an international reputation in the terlet, and thousands of rabid chihuahua ankle-biters. Geez, if he can’t deliver Paradise with all the advantages the Bushiviks have given him, why, he must be a complete and utter doofus!
I agree the entitlement concept is a problem. The financial institutes have demonstrated that clearly. They screw up ,they are entitled to a tax payer bailout,with no oversight on what is done . Just trust us. We are really good thieves and want to help. I delete emails offering me better deals from people in African countries that just want me to trust them and I will prosper.
I wish we could delete Paulson that easily.
That seems to work both ways. Aside from the statement you quoted, the only campaign promises I can find right now regarding spending relate to cutting back on pork barrel spending, reinstating PAYGO, going “line by line” through the budget, and criticizing McCain for taking a hatchet, rather than a scalpel, to federal spending. You seem to have the impression that Obama made cutting spending a major theme of his campaign, yet so far as I can tell, he only made one statement to that effect.
Cry me a river. He hasn’t even taken office yet! He has actually done anything! And what is all this about? That he may delay raising taxes on the wealthy because of the economic crisis? Seems to me you’re making a really cheap damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t argument. Either Obama is a liar who won’t uphold campaign promises, or he’s a reckless socialist who wants to raise taxes in an economic climate that has gotten progressively worse, even since the election.
Look, I understand you don’t like him. But I would expect a little better critique than this facile nonsense.
I give you credit for implying that Obama will be up to speed on his job in two years. That strikes me as the exact opposite of Bush, who seemed to be doing fairly well for his first two years, before learning how to really fuck things up. Isn’t it interesting that it took him just under 8 years of on-the-job training to figure out how to completely wreck the economy?
Have you all noticed that Obama in his rollout of the economic team did **not **say that he thinks we should wait to raise taxes again? He said they would go back up, whether when they expire or sooner. I don’t think he’s conceding any such point as “taxes above 35% are bad”–he’s just acknowledging that political possibilities keep on the table a delay in raising them.
I see this argument a lot, but in fairness, this is a position for which one runs electively, and typically on a platform that suggests the candidate can solve the problems. “I know the situation; I know what to do. Elect me.”
Generally the reminders about how badly screwed up things really are–and why this will prevent actual delivery of the promises–come after the populace has voted the candidate into office in the hope the original promises were deliverables.
Your post has some fair comebacks, but actually I’m still confused. During the campaign, Obama promised to return tax rates on higher income groups to the Clinton era. As I understand it, to you that does not imply, “Soaking the rich”. Me neither.
If I’m following you, the answer to your question is (IMHO), “Not much”. Obama never indicated that he would raise the top marginal rate to 70%, so while there will always be those in the ranks of the disappointed, I doubt whether there will be any organized knashing of teeth among Dems.
That said. I perceive from various message boards that hard-core liberals are crawling out of the woodwork. Ideas that would have been pounded to the ground in the age of market fundamentalism are receiving airing. That’s ok, but I’m beginning to expect that I might be waging a 2 front war on these boards over the next few years.
I agree that he’s intelligent. I’m not clear on what you would consider “a striped down health plan” or “fairly neutral energy reforms”.
The financial crisis changes what would have been prudent domestic policy, and Obama is a prudent man. Whatever he does on health care or energy policy will have been vetted by some of the top economic minds in the land. Along those lines, I expect a push for comprehensive health care reform (as exemplified on Obama’s website) and a cap and trade program on Greenhouse emissions within the next 8 years. Indeed, I find it very conceivable that a bill that includes health care mandates could pass Congress, which would exceed Obama’s election plan in terms of ambition.
The OP:
We are in the midst of a bad financial crisis now. IMHO, we should just let the Bush tax cuts expire in Jan 2011, rather than rescinding them in 2009 as originally planned. It’s best to match policy to situation. Along those lines, back in Jan 2008 I would have had a more anti-deficit POV. After all, I wasn’t calling for $600 billion of stimulus spending back then. Now I am.
Soak the rich? It’s more like gently mist the rich.
Obama is a pragmatist more than anything. Why get in a fight about a jobs program to raise taxes for a year at most before they’ll go up anyway. NFW a renewal of the tax cuts will even come up for a vote. Bush pulled a fast one in setting expiration dates in order to make his tax cuts look more affordable, and now it is coming back to bite his Republican and rich friends.
This is going to also increase the deficit, which I guess has been the conservative position for the past 28 years, but didn’t used to be.
Don’t count out the reforms. When the Fed is printing funny money for banks, you can bet Obama is going to get some for what he wants to do.
Check out the polls on that, will you? Not only was the public against it, but they got more and more against it the more Bush campaigned for it. Remember he had to admit how privatization wasn’t going to fix the so-called problem? It was a non-starter. It appears the new party line was that being against something as a minority was the same as killing it - which doesn’t explain why we kept on torturing people.
OK, assume this is true for the sake of the argument. I repeat, what is going to be Obama’s excuse this time? The Democrats have controlled Congress for two years, and will control all three branches of the federal government at least until 2011. What are they going to do about Social Security? What are they going to do about Medicare? OK, so Obama didn’t mean it when he claimed he would cut spending.
I heard all this bullshit for the last few years about we should elect Democrats because the Republicans increased spending and the deficit. Now we have, and they are going to increase spending and the deficit. This is different how?
Maybe they’ll spend it on useful wealth-creating stuff rather than piling it up into a big heap and setting fire to it like your lot did.
Um, this didn’t really address my point. Obama supported a 39.6% tax on higher income groups, while McCain wanted to the top bracket at 36%. The puzzle was why so many conservatives seemed to think that these 2 positions were qualitatively different (Redistributionist! Spreading the Wealth! OMG!!). There are a number of hypotheses, but hysteria seems to me to be the best one.
I welcome other explanations.
Pick up the newspaper and you may note that we are in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Smart decision makers --whether in business or government – adjust their policies to the actual situation, as opposed to a pre-existing ideology. Along those lines, I see that the Republican clown show continues: House Republican Leader John Boehner thinks the best way to combat economic collapse is… you guessed it a capital gains tax cut!
From what I saw of the Barbara Walters interview, Obama seemed to think that pushing a tax hike would be too onerous and that it may be more feasible to just let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2011. He emphasized that he would need to talk with his economic advisors to come up with a solid solution. I believe the interview is posted on YouTube.
Now, personally, I don’t think he is waffling. Did Obama ever say he would raise taxes on the rich within a certain set period of time?
I somehow thought that they would being paying more and I would be paying less.
Better it be onerous on the wealthy than on me.
What an I missing here?
Not onerous on high income groups. Onerous on the economy. Also recall, that this amounts to postponement of the upper income tax increase, not reversal. I expect the middle class tax cut to go through.
(While I’m here, I’m thinking that my response to foolsguinea was incoherent. I retract.)
I’m on the record for being hawkish on deficits on this board – but most of the time I took care to lay down the caveat that deficits are beneficial during economic downturns. A review of introductory macroeconomics is recommended. Now, some forms of deficit spending stimulate more than others. But I suspect the practical scope for temporary deficit spending may be limited. Regardless, we might evaluate the plan as a whole before passing judgment.