In a less than amenable position forced upon House Republicans, on Tuesday the House voted in favor of New Years Day Senate legislation that put a stop to tax increases imposed on the middle class and the automatic tax cuts that took effect at midnight on January 1. However, this piece of legislation did not include cuts necessary to reduce deficit spending and the national debt but instead, once again, kicked the can down the road of fiscal irresponsibility.
In a statement following the House vote, Speaker of the House, John Boehner stated "Now the focus turns to spending," but the harsh reality is that no real spending reform is likely to transpire. The Speaker has to be, at best, guardedly optimistic in thinking that President Obama has any intention of working towards spending reforms that could pass muster with Conservative Republicans. Most of the House Conservative Republicans balked at the January 1 Senate legislation, giving the thumbs down to a deal which included tax increases on the wealthy and ignored spending cuts.
President Obama has been on a spending spree since the day he took his Presidential Oath. Posting an annual deficit in excess of $1 trillion each year he has been in office, the President fails to accept culpability for his hand in the deficit, instead placing blame on two wars and a recession he inherited. However, what the President fails to acknowledge is his infamous campaign pledge of cutting the deficit in half by the end of his first term, which incidentally, he made while the two wars were in play and the economy was already in downturn. The real contributor to the deficit is Obama himself, having increased domestic government agencies spending by over ten percent and non-defense discretionary spending nearly 25%. Additionally the President has wasted billions of dollars on failed stimulus packages and auto industry bailouts, all of this in his first two years in office alone! What might be the most telling tale of President Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility is his own administration’s failure to have passed a single budget since entering office.
The latest act of fiscal irresponsibility, on the part of President Obama, has been playing out for over a year now, starting with his failure to lead lawmakers down a path of fiscal reform during the 2011 debt-ceiling crises. As a result of this failure, the nation’s debt-ceiling was raised by $400 billion which resulted in our nation’s credit rating being lowered for the first time in history. To prevent the need to raise the debt-ceiling again, in the near future, a deal was made that deferred the task of deficit reduction to a newly appointed Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction which, in August of 2011, also failed to produce deficit reduction legislation, as mandated by law. Since that time, complete inaction, on the part of the Obama administration, led the nation right up to and over the fiscal cliff this past Monday.
In what the main stream media describes as ‘an extreme difference in political ideology’ that is preventing the two parties from coming together on fiscal matters, the fact still remains that President Obama has an obligation to Americans to reduce the nation’s debt, regardless of ideology. To date, the President has reneged on virtually every promise he has made to the American people in regards to the reduction of the national debt and deficit spending, simply refusing to take any realistic actions towards spending reform while continuing to add new government spending and demanding new revenue in support of his socialist ideals.
The President continues to play a very dangerous game with our nation’s financial well being. With a mannerism that many critics have described as ‘dictator like’, President Obama has adopted the ‘my way or the highway’ approach to negotiations, an approach where the word compromise simply does not exist. Stemming from his own arrogance, the President has made modern history with the fiscal failures he has achieved during his first term in office and judging from the mandates he recently placed on those Democratic Party leaders responsible for trying to hammer out a fiscal cliff deal, his second term as President will be equally filled with failure and fiscal irresponsibility.
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