Has History Passed Obama By?
Barack Obama's dream of being a transformational president who alters the course of his country died 48 hours ago.
The message America sent Obama and the men and women America sent to Congress to replace his allies impel one to ask: Why would he want a second term?
Why would the most liberal president since FDR wish to preside over the major surgery on the social safety net that must be done in the era of austerity we have entered? The liberal hour is over. Why would the Party of Government not prefer that Republicans do the painful work of paring back programs for which Democrats have fought since the New Deal?
The media have begun a drumbeat to demand that the new speaker, John Boehner, compromise with Obama for the good of the country.
Are these people delusional?
Republicans were brought to power because they were the Party of No. Boehner takes the gavel from Nancy Pelosi because he led the fight to kill the Obama stimulus, Obamacare, card check, amnesty, cap-and-trade and Barney Frank's financial reform.
Boehner's beliefs are closer to the Tea Party than to Obama. He owes his speakership to the Tea Party. His political interests dictate allying with the Tea Party and moving even further away from Obama.
Why would Boehner lead his caucus into a suicide pact with Obama when, in Boehner's eyes, the national interest and his own interests point in the other direction?
The left has yet to grasp that the nation has repudiating it as well as Obama. America has shifted to the right, which again raises the question of Obama's relevance. Why would our most liberal president since FDR want to lead the nation into an age of austerity?
Here is retiring GOP Sen. Judd Gregg, the fiscal conservative that Barack Obama most wanted in his Cabinet.
"This nation is on a course where if we don't ... get ... fiscal policy (under control), we're Greece. We're a banana republic."
"(T)he Tea Party is in the mainstream of where political thought is right now," said Gregg. "We've had a radical explosion in the size of government in the last two years: You've gone from 20 percent of GDP to 24 percent of GDP headed toward 28 percent of GDP. That has to be brought under control or ... we're going to bankrupt the country."
Conservatives, Republicans, Tea Partiers all agree with Gregg.
But how does Obama, whose deficits have added more to the debt in two years than Bush added in eight, convert and become a deficit hawk?
Consider Social Security, which all agree must be made solvent.
There are two ways. One is to raise the wage base on which Social Security taxes are imposed and raise the 6.2 percent payroll tax on both employers and employees. But these are major tax increases. And the GOP and Tea Party will fix bayonets to fight them.
The other way is to raise the retirement age to 70 and re-index Social Security COLAs (cost-of-living adjustments) to prices, not wages, reducing future benefits for baby boomers and generations X and Y.
Will Pelosi's battered liberals go along with reducing Social Security benefits if Obama proposes it? Or would that tear what is left of his tattered coalition to pieces?
To cut spending to 20 percent of GDP from 24 would require annual slashes of $600 billion, eliminating a sixth of the budget.
Will Democrats go along with that magnitude of cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment benefits, earned income tax credits, infrastructure, Pell grants and welfare?
Will Republicans go along with cuts of that size for the Iraq and Afghan wars, new weapons systems, closing of bases and withdrawal of troops from Korea, Japan or Europe? To get 4 percent of GDP out of defense would require putting the Pentagon on furlough.
Bottom line: The new Republican House has the numbers and will to block new taxes and fund both wars and the rising defense budget. And the president has the veto power to block severe cuts in social programs, which his bloodied forces will demand that he do.
Were this a parliamentary system, Obama would be out of power, as the nation voted to reject his party and reverse the course of the country.
In Britain, under Prime Minister David Cameron, the austerity the people voted for is being imposed. In Virginia and New Jersey, where Govs. Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie were elected in 2009 to change the direction of state government, this is happening.
In Washington, however, where Obama's agenda and party were repudiated by the nation, they still retain the power to prevent the nation from going where America voted to go.
The center has disintegrated. The result: a deadlock of democracy, with neither party responsible and neither accountable, as we drift toward the falls.
Greece, here we come.
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Entries(RSS)
@46 Dr. Wilson,
..."simple-minded, innocent Yankees..."
Why, that is the nicest thing I've ever heard you call us!
Dr. Wilson, forgive me, but Yankees are not the only ones knee-jerking around in the U.S. of A. Just look at how many Southerners and Midwesterners--who as you rightly point out bear the brunt of the military service--voted G.W. BUSH in 2004, in the middle of the worst stretch of Gulf War II. Willful idiots enabling the conman class.
Unless you meant to argue that the conman class has turned us ALL into "simple-minded Yankees," regardless of geographical origins...
@Gilbert Jacobi: Good point that AMERICAN wage-slaves, as you call them, are not overpaid. However, that should be qualified: MEXICAN and other alien wage-slaves ARE overpaid, in the sense that they should not be working and earning money in the United States AT ALL.
Matt Weber on 9 November writes:
"If you make a million a year and only pay SS tax on 90,000 of it, you won’t receive any more than someone who makes 90,000 a year. That’s why simply raising or eliminating the cap won’t do anything to shore it up, at least not without turning it into a blatant system of welfare for old people."
I don't see how it can be called "welfare" if people have payed into it. We may not be defraying 100% of SS's costs, but we are doing our bit, unlike welfare layabouts. It's the government's fault the money doesn't earn a decent return, not ours. If the high earners had to pay on every dollar earned just like the servants do, wouldn't their influential voices be a valuable addition to the pressure for reform, and their financial expertise a boon to figuring out the means for effecting it?
NGPM writes,
"However, that should be qualified: MEXICAN and other alien wage-slaves ARE overpaid, in the sense that they should not be working and earning money in the United States AT ALL."
THIS is a very eye-opening way of looking at it! A little rhetorical ju jitsu (but very true) that should come in mighty handy the next time this argument arises.
By 'welfare' I meant that the ratio of paid-in to collected for richer people would become much less than one. They would essentially be paying an extra SS 'continuance tax' and reaping no benefit from it. You're right though, that was imprecise as even if rich people pay more it doesn't necessarily translate to poorer people gaining anything more than their paid-for share.
But it's all still very pointless. SS does nothing that a trip to the bank wouldn't, and does it worse, and yet it's untouchable. As every generation will eventually demand their returns, it's safe to say SS will be going down with the American ship one day.
I should add that I'm aware of and in agreement with the argument that SS helped pave the way for the current entitlement mentality, and has produced perhaps as many bad consequences as good, e.g.: decreased incentive to save, weakened sense of responsibility for the old folks within families, increased power and size of government, etc. I simply wanted to sound off on one of my pet peeve injustices, which also happens to be, IMO, the fatal flaw in the way SS was set up.
It's a rather ironic thing about today's governments, that you have one branch of government that aims towards protecting incomes (like Social Security) and another branch of government that aims towards destroying all hard earned incomes (Bernanke's Federal Reserve and new round of quantitative easing).
@56: Of course. Social Security is just the Kool-Aid factory, the opiate for the masses. Nothing ironic at all, just the same old lying bourgeois buffoons that have been running the U.S. for many many decades.
I suppose that when you have an oligarchy of parasites like the masters of the Fed, who use inflationary fiat currency and taxpayer funded government debt to siphon everyone else's hard earned wealth off to themselves, thus impoverishing the lower classes, cause inflationary boom and bust cycles that ruin millions, drive farmers off their land into factories, and cause, over time, the slow centralisation of property ownership into the hands of the wealthier few, you need a social cushion of some kind just to keep the masses from realising how badly they're being robbed and screwed, and prevent them from rising up in bloody rebellion and cutting the throats of the parasites. Thus SS and welfare (bread) and sports, soap operas, and the xxx channels (circuses).
A statue of a plain looking broad holding a torch, a defective, cracked bell, the right music, pictures of olden script on aged parchment, and a piece of striped cloth, along with pictures of uniformed men, tanks, and scenes of Iwo and Normandy will work to entrance many of the rest.
Whose throats will the masses cut? Bernanke is not exactly the head of the Fed, but a chairman of one particular committee, handpicked away from a simpler life as a college professor. The Federal Reserve itself is complicated, made of several loosely connected non-hierarchical branches doing entirely different things, and one insider, Frederic Mishkin, suggests even people within it don't know its full structure and functioning.
Didn't the two US Congressmen trying to get the Fed audited say that it didn't matter whether it was Greenspan, Bernanke, or anybody in charge of the Federal Reserve, because they were just drivers/chauffeurs and the Federal Reserve was just a dangerous car? It's amazing that a central bank put in place in 1913 to avoid bank runs now takes on entirely different functions not relevant to its original purpose and has gone all the way to quantitative easing. If we ever asked a central banker what they do, they'd probably respond that even they don't know; they just get 4000 page reports and have to read and implement it in a week.
@58 Allen Wilson 14 November,
Bravo, Mr.Wilson! The power of your rhetoric rivals Buchanan's in this post. Your sympathetic reading of the plight of the "robbed and screwed" is balm on a very sore spot for me. And your last paragraph hits like a sledgehammer.
Mr. Allen Wilson: The FED has long since driven most farmers off the land. Hell! The factories are gone as well. The proles now are nothing, but cheap servants of the rich, and cannon fodder for endless war.
Thank you, Mr Jacobi. We seem to be in the same boat, robbed and screwed.
Mr Sanjay, you are probably right about what you wrote in response to me, but where does the value of my money go when it loses value? Follow that trail, and you may just find the culprits.
Of course the Roman empire inflated it's money supply out of necessity during the crisis of the 3rd century, but we're not talking of such things as that. We're talking here about private parties. Who loans that money to the government and collects interest on it? There's your culprits, but of course they'll get off scot free.