“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”- Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States
Growing up, my parents claimed that my main and most important responsibility was my school work, and thereafter my sports engagements and whatever chores (often the bare minimum) I had to complete for the house. Like any other teenager, despite my light workload I often put my responsibilities off for as long as I could. This attitude would leave my father incensed, resulting one day in a blow out over my dereliction of landscaper duties. “Everything with you is mañana” he asserted, as I had all the time in the world to cut the lawn but kept putting it off to the proverbial next day. While this is typical characteristic of a teenager, it is a glaring deficiency of a Presidential administration.
In his four years as President, Mr. Obama has chosen to kick the can down the road on spending, entitlement reform, and American fossil fuel options. As demonstrated by the formation of the Tea Party, a majority of the American people have collectively come to the realization that our current fiscal trajectory will ultimately ruin us. Unfortunately, the one man who has the power to spearhead reform in our spending seems content with putting it off until tomorrow.
In contrast, when Senator Obama campaigned for President in 2008, he took President Bush to task for his deficit sending:
“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome.”
Despite this attack, and a promise to halve the debt by the end of his first term, President Obama has amassed a total $5 Trillion of debt in four years. #44 by his lonesome added more than #43, and in half the time. In response to accusations regarding his debt run-up, Mr. Obama has insisted that the federal government needed to first spend money to keep the country out of another Great Depression. Okay then. If that were the case, and we believed in President Obama and his Keynesian approach to economics, one must ask when does that spending come to an end? The $800B stimulus was not enough? We are now in the President’s fourth year, and this is the fourth consecutive budget he has submitted in which the United States government is operating in the red. Such spending is not sustainable, nor has it seemed to give the economy the much needed jolt for a full recovery. The President refuses to address the spending problem, or at least has no intent on doing so any time soon.
Part of his refusal in correcting America’s fiscal situation is the inability to put forth real recommendations on reforming entitlement programs in the country. Social security, Medicaid, and most importantly Medicare have become a weight on our federal government that will ultimately drown us in our own self-indulgence. There are no calls on the right to do away with these benefits; quite the contrary, a joint reform plan for Medicare has been put forward by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI). Agree with it or not, President Obama has done little to even acknowledge the plan, no less come up with one on his own. There is no easy or quick fix to these problems, but a step has to be actually taken to get the ball rolling. Again, the President seems content with putting it off.
For President Obama, the problem with the entitlement issue is not only that he is not willing to confront it, but that his own Party holds him back from doing so. Recently after an announcement for his plan regarding entitlement reform, Paul Ryan was depicted in a Democratic ad where the Congressman’s lookalike was literally pushing Grandma off a cliff. The Democrats’ inability to address these issues is not only scandalously irresponsible, but serves as a calculated political strategy to scare seniors (the largest voting bloc in the country) that is nothing short of cowardly.
In his daily briefing Tuesday, Jay Carney proclaimed that the Republicans are politicizing high gas prices and the administration’s decision not to invest in the Keystone XL Pipeline. First and foremost, it was the President who originally “politicized” the issue, siding with fringe environmental groups in hopes of shoring up a specific contingent of his base for re-election in 2012. Secondly, the Republicans have been able and continue to make political hay over the issue because of how irrational a decision it was by the President. Despite the missed opportunity to create more jobs for Americans in a time where employment is sought desperately, there is a larger issue. Day after day, our foreign dignitaries and many American citizens stress over the prospects of an Iranian made nuclear bomb. We would not be as limited as we are concerning Iran, or any other country in the increasingly turbulent Middle East, without our reliance on the oil produced in that region.
As noted by Dr. Charles Krauthammer last week, we are always told by Democrats that expanded drilling and exploration will not immediately pay dividends in oil production or prices, not even for five years. Jay Carney did so on Tuesday, arguing gas prices would not be affected by such a decision to construct the pipeline. But this argument has been hashed out for twenty years, which for those of you counting, at home is five years four times over. We will never know the extent of the rewards reaped from our natural resources if we continually delay the attempt to actually utilize them. There is no more of an egregious example of this ideology than the decision on the Keystone Pipeline, and no more of a vivid consequence than our compromised position in the Middle East.
To be fair, President Obama and his staff have tackled issues head on in his time in office: most notably producing an $800B stimulus package to combat the recession that did not work, and shortly thereafter crafting and passing a bill to establish state-run healthcare that no one wants. Both items serve as the administration’s landmark legislative achievements, and simultaneously as its campaign Scarlet Letter (the President did not refer to either in his State of the Union address, nor subsequent campaign speeches since). Conservative pundits condemn his record as one marked by arrogance; where the President ultimately believes his big government policies will be proven right in the end, as the State undoubtedly knows better than its citizens. But in his record as President, it is the conscious choice to ignore the important issues I mentioned above that displays the definitive form of hubris; where President Obama fails to acknowledge the dire consequences of this ignorance, which will result in a deeply indebted, energy dependent and therefor increasingly weaker America.
Last week in a campaign speech to the UAW, President Obama tried out a new campaign line to the applause of his union supporters: “5 years from now when I’m not President…” It is nice to see the Mr. Obama looking ahead for once, but what about his actual plans for that second term? Besides raising taxes on “the rich” and giving everyone their “fair share”, does he have a plan to solve the immense problems I’ve described above? If so, he hasn’t told us yet- just make sure you understand that he will be elected to another four years. We can hammer out the details mañana.
– John P. Burns
tammanyhalldotcom 