Here's an excerpt of the President's closing remarks at the Fiscal Responsibility Summit. After being thanked "for bringing us together", he started with: "
I'm going to keep on talking to Eric Cantor. Some day, sooner or later, he is going to say, boy, Obama had a good idea. (Laughter.) It's going to happen. You watch, you watch."
"
Obama (not you) had a good idea". Some may take that as signaling a retreat. To me it reads more like a threat: Eric we have your measure.
Next came a lengthy explanation of the need for a stimulus and the failure of bipartisanship. In an exceptionally clear exposition, designed to catch the ears of fiscal conservatives, amongst others, there are some unpolished gems. Unpolished? Yes, because as yet they have not been fashioned into shining daggers. My notes in italics.
I just want to be very clear about this. I've said it to the governors this morning and I've said it to my staff in the past: We chose to move forward on a recovery package because there was a strong sense among the vast majority of economists that
if we did not try to fill a $1 trillion-a-year hole in demand, because of the drastic pulling back of businesses and consumers, that the recession would get worse, unemployment would increase, and as a consequence,
tax revenues would go down, and the long-term deficit and debt projections would be even higher. That was the basis for the decision.(Note to conservatives - A vote against the recovery plan was a vote to increase the deficit and debt)It was not ideologically driven.
I have no interest in making government bigger for the sake of it. I've got more than enough on my plate, as Lindsey knows, between Afghanistan and Iraq and issues of terrorism that if the private sector was just humming along and we could just make government more efficient and not have to worry about this financial crisis, I would love that. But that's not the circumstance we find ourselves in. So I made the best judgment about the need for us to move forward on a recovery package.
(Big Government is not a end in itself - Democratic orthodoxy since I don't know when, but then comes the National Security Card - spending that Republican hawks have never had a problem with. The implications is clear: petty gamesmanship about vital spending, when as the GOP used to like to say "There's a War On.")There were some differences, significant differences between the parties about this. I would suggest that if you look at the differences, they amounted to maybe 10, maybe 15 percent of the total package. There wasn't a lot of argument about countercyclical payments to states to make sure that people had extended unemployment insurance or food stamps There wasn't a lot of disagreement about some of the infrastructure that needs to be repaired, and there wasn't a lot of disagreement on the tax cut front -- 15, 20 percent of it, there were some disagreements about.
(A note to Republican and Independent voters - The Congressional GOP was prepared to put job, your city, your state, your country at risk for the 10 - 15% they didn't like. They even liked 80% of the tax cuts and voted against them)(A note to Bobby Jindal - "There wasn't a lot of argument about countercyclical payments to states to make sure that people had extended unemployment insurance or food stamps". I mean no one would want to punish constituents for the recession, would they Bobby?)But the reason I make this point is that if we're going to be successful moving forward, it's important for us to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and our politics. And the reason that there is no contradiction, from my perspective, in doing the recovery package first but now focusing on the medium and long term, is because our hope is that this economy starts recovering. We will have taken a hit, in terms of our debt and our deficit. But as Bob Greenstein said,
the recovery package will account for about one-tenth of 1 percent of our long-term debt. The real problems are the structural deficits and the structural debt that we've been accumulating and all of us are complicit in.
(The recovery package is too big? "One-tenth of 1 percent of our long-term debt"? I mean, how did the National Debt ever get to be so huge? "All of us are complicit" says Barack, but as the President hones his great communicator skills, no doubt he will get around to explaining that some are more complicit than others.)http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-in-question-and-answer-session-at-the-closing-of-the-Fiscal-Responsibility-Summit/Early in the primary season, a few Freepers saw, to their horror "the anti-Reagan" in Barack Obama. Here, unscripted, Obama is stepping up to the plate, IMO. The icing on the cake? Speaker after speaker emphasized that Health Care must be given first priority. "It's going to happen. You watch, you watch."
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