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Today in Washington, D.C. - April 14, 2011:
The House passed (260-167) the H.R. 1473 that will keep the government running through September. It cuts $38.5 billion in federal spending and has been sent to the Senate.
The Senate will vote later today or tomorrow on the H.R. 1473, the continuing resolution funding the government through September, H. Con. Res. 35, which would defund the Democrat health care law, and H. Con. Res. 36, which would prohibit federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Each will require 60 votes to pass in the Senate. Senate democrats are expected to vote in sufficient numbers with the republicans to pass the continuing resolution. However, the democrats most likely will defeat the defunding resolutions, but they will be on the record as voting "no," "present" or "not voting." Readers may recall that Barack Obama as a Senator avoided issues by either voting present or being absent.
President Obama’s speech on the debt and his budget plans yesterday was disappointing on many levels, and press reactions reflected that. Reports called out the president for again presenting no details and passing the heavy lifting to others. Both The Washington Post and Politico highlighted the excessively partisan tone of the speech, while The Wall Street Journal and Charles Krauthammer blasted it as “dishonest” and full of “distortions.” And from a policy perspective, President Obama spent a lot of time talking about tax increases, which Politico deemed “a battle cry to his base.”
Much like his February budget plan, which editorial boards derided for “punting” on the serious debt problems facing the country, The Washington Post wrote of the speech, “even as he joined the battle, Obama immediately volleyed the substantive work of debt reduction back to Capitol Hill . . . .” And Politico noted, “Obama – none too eager to walk the tax plank alone ahead of a re-election year — intentionally left the details blank.” As The Post described, “Even as he savaged the GOP proposal, Obama was less than specific about his own. He did not say exactly how he would reform how corporations are taxed, what he would do to achieve a simpler tax system or which defense programs he would cut. On Social Security, he not only didn’t announce a proposal but would not say whether one was likely to be included in the final legislation.”
And while the speech was light on details, it was heavy on partisan attacks and finger-pointing. In The Washington Post’s description, “Obama announced his framework for deficit reduction in a speech that at times employed the highly partisan words he used on the campaign trail.” Politico didn’t dress it up: “President Barack Obama extended a fiscal olive branch to Republicans on Wednesday. Then he beat them up with it. Obama’s long-anticipated speech on the deficit at George Washington University was one of the oddest rhetorical hybrids of his presidency – a serious stab at reforming entitlements cloaked in a 2012 campaign speech that was one of the most overtly partisan broadsides he’s ever delivered from a podium with a presidential seal.”
The Wall Street Journal editors blasted Obama’s speech for “its blistering partisanship and multiple distortions,” declaring it “dishonest even by modern political standards.” Charles Krauthammer was unsparing in his criticism: “I’ve rarely heard a speech by a president so shallow, so hyper-partisan and so intellectually dishonest . . . .” He pointed out Obama “didn’t even get to his own alternative until more than halfway through the speech. and when he did, he threw out numbers suspended in mid-air with nothing under them with all kinds of goals and guidelines and triggers that mean nothing.”
As for the substance of the speech, Politico wrote, “The centerpiece was a battle cry to his base, a call for $1 trillion in new taxes on the rich . . . in lieu of the deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and now identified with the GOP.” The Wall Street Journal reported, “Mr. Obama's plan includes a number of tax increases. He would eliminate the Bush-era tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year and eliminate a number of tax breaks, which he didn't detail.” And in an editorial today, the WSJ identified “three significant tax increases—via higher top brackets, the tax hikes in ObamaCare and fewer tax deductions.”
Yet the president may find that even Democrats aren’t quite receptive to new tax increases. Forty Senate Democrats recently voted to extend the Bush tax cuts that Obama, after signing the extension, now says he wants to let expire again. A number of Democrat senators have recently said they aren’t on board with tax increases. According to KVNO News in Omaha, “In his weekly conference call with reporters, Senator Ben Nelson said he never supported Obama’s first proposal to roll back the cuts. And he still doesn’t believe now is the time to do it. ‘I’ve not changed my mind on that,’ Nelson said. ‘I look at any kind of talk about tax increases as being a distraction away from the essential job of reducing the growth in spending.’”
Tim Phillips, President of Americans for Prosperity responded, "President Obama delivered what was billed as his "new" vision on the budget. But, watching it I realized his speech was the same old big government path of higher spending, more debt, and massive tax increases. If President Obama wants us to believe he now wants to reduce deficits just 2 months after submitting a budget with red ink as far as the eye can see, then he should propose a new and complete formal budget. Instead, like his friends on the Left, Obama has launched a full-throated attack on leaders like Congressman Paul Ryan who stand for real budget reform and genuine spending cuts."
Gary Bauer, President of the Campaign for Working Families said, "As expected, today's speech was short on specifics, and it was largely more of the same from Obama. Whenever the president is in trouble with the voters, he rushes out to deliver a few well-scripted lines that have been thoroughly focus group tested for maximum effect. . . . While today's speech lacked substance on spending cuts, there were two unmistakable promises: higher taxes and gutting the defense budget. We've been down this road before, and it doesn't end well. Obama is morphing into Jimmy Carter. Carter slashed the defense budget at a time when the Soviet Union was on the march. Ronald Reagan had to run deficits to rebuild our military, but he helped win the Cold War, and the evil empire that was the Soviet Union is gone. The next Democrat to take the White House slashed defense spending and left George W. Bush with a much smaller military in the aftermath of 9/11. Now Obama, who just volunteered us for a third war in Libya, wants to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors while Iran and China are on the march. But it doesn't end there. Obama vowed to raise your taxes. . . . He blamed much of the deficit on "unpaid for tax cuts" and went on to say that he would find "spending reductions in the tax code." Translation: Raising taxes results in government spending reductions. Only a liberal would consider allowing you to keep more of your hard-earned money as government spending. That logic works only if you assume that all money belongs to the government!"
Reince Priebus, RNC Chairman responded, "The Confiscator-in-Chief is at it again -- right in time for Tax Day. Today, President Obama proposed trillions in new taxes to bankroll the liberal Democrats' big government policies at a time when our economy is still struggling, gas prices are soaring and unemployment is still alarmingly high. Tomorrow, he will rake in campaign cash for his re-election from three fundraising events in Chicago. The tax hikes President Obama wants will only fuel Washington's addiction to spending rather than help curb it. More importantly, they will hurt one of the strongest engines of growth and job creation in our economy: small businesses. And they will harm middle class families by taking more money from their pockets at a time when Americans need every dime to cover their expenses. In fact, according to the Tax Foundation, Americans will pay more in taxes in 2011 than they will spend on food, clothing and housing combined -- and it's still not enough for Barack Obama."
Bill Wilson, President of Americans for Limited Government responded, "Barack Obama wants to pretend that the reason we are spending more than we take in is because we don't take in enough, when the real problem is that we are spending too much. In 2007, the budget deficit was just $160.7 billion, but this year it will rise to $1.645 trillion, a 923 percent increase. How can that be when tax rates have been relatively the same since then? Since 2007, annual spending has increased $1.119 trillion, and revenues have decreased by $394 billion. Put simply, 75 percent of the increased shortfall is because spending increased and only 25 percent is because revenue dropped because of the down economy. That means we have a spending problem, plain and simple."
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had a similar reaction. “Despite the President's imaginative account of how we arrived at the situation we’re in, the American people are well past the point of believing that Washington will be able to make good on all its promises if only we let the President and Democrats in Congress raise taxes. Americans know that we face a fiscal crisis not because we tax too little, but because we spend too much. . . . The American people are not inclined to take advice on fiscal responsibility from an administration who’s unprecedented borrowing and spending has done so much to create the mess we’re in. After two years of adding trillions to the debt and ignoring our nation's looming fiscal nightmare, the President may be right in thinking that the politically expedient thing to do is point the finger at others. But the truly responsible thing would be to admit that his own two-year experiment in big government has been a disaster for the economy and itself a major driver of our debt.”
Tags: Washington, D.C., US House, US Senate, Barack Obama, deficit, speech, increse taxes, spend more, reactions to speech, Confiscator-in-Chief To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!
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