I think Clinton deserves as much credit as Gingrich.
Clinton was a canny politician who knew when it was time to triangulate. Obama is a prisoner of his ideology and can only do more of the same, while lamely protesting that he is too a fiscal conservative -- and the only statesman dedicated to the good of his country, totally unlike the venal politicians he is surrounded by. This shtick is getting old in a hurry.
I am not happy with Obama, but I think he is getting a much worse rap than he deserves. The key factors of his headline deficit numbers are the Great Recession, the boomer retirement that's generating Social Security deficits rather than surpluses, the out of control increase in health care costs that is blowing up Medicare and Medicaid, and the incorporation of war costs in the regular budget rather than hidding them, as Bush did. None of these are Obama's sins.
Obama's two sins, in my view, is that he did not structure the stimulus or the health care bill correctly.
The Social Security numbers are not an excuse because everybody who can read numbers could see them coming twenty-five years ago, the time of the last Social Security "fix".
The two most salient facts about the Stimulus are that a) it failed to stimulate, b) it jacked up the Federal Budget by nearly a trillion dollars permanently, because it was rolled into the baseline of Obama & Pelosi's one and only budget. Which means we are spending the stimulus all over again every year + 7.5% of course, this being DC.
And let's not even get into what the health care bill will really cost if gets implemented. It has already cost billions in what I think of as the "preliminary bribe" stage of implementation.
The chief difference between your view of Obama and mine is that you think The Great Recession just happened to Obama. I think his policies put the "Great" into The Great Recession. If he had done absolutely nothing, I think the economy would be in MUCH better shape by now. He is killing jobs left, right and center. We haven't even discussed the regulations being pumped out by his EPA, or his entire administration's war on coal and oil. |
