Day No. 972: President Obama unveils a deficit reduction plan

September 19, 2011 4:10 pm

"We didn’t need a rating agency to tell us that we need a balanced, long-term approach to deficit reduction. That was true last week. That was true last year. That was true the day I took office."--Barack Obama, Aug. 8, 2011.

Barack Obama took office Jan. 20, 2009. That was 972 days ago this morning, almost to the hour when he finally offered his newest full-blown deficit reduction plan. (See full Obama text below.)

Or as he put it, "Good morning, everybody. Please have a seat."

If it's Monday, the campaigning president must be issuing a new plan for something (before another $35,800 per ticket fundraiser in New York City). Last week it was his new Monday stimulus package, which was so urgent it's been delayed, as we discussed right here this morning.

Today, it was how to pay for his new stimulus package plus how to start reducing overspending and paying down the $14,000,000,000,000+ in debt that someone else is responsible for accumulating in recent years.

Here's the Washington Democrat's diagnosis:

During this past decade, profligate spending in Washington, tax cuts for multimillionaires and billionaires, the cost of two wars and the recession turned a record surplus into a yawning deficit, and that left us with a big pile of IOUs.

Everyone remembers his last deficit reduction plan in April. Back then he was determined "to shrink the deficit as a share of the economy, but not to do so so abruptly with spending cuts that would hamper growth or prevent us from helping small businesses and middle-class families get back on their feet."

Which struck many as suspiciously like not much of a shovel-ready deficit reduction program.

Now that it's autumn, it will surprise only children that the Democrat wants to increase taxes because we aren't paying enough and need more to spend. He also details impressive, large-scale cuts that include $1 trillion that we don't have and he says we won't be spending on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to this line of thinking, our spouse has been informed that we'll be buying a Lamborghini (red) with the cuts we've made in not buying a corporate jet.

"This plan cuts $2 in spending for every dollar in new revenues," the president proclaimed. Reforms to....
...agricultural subsidies, the billions that go to Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac, paybacks from financial firms, structural reforms to Medicare, maybe a complete tax code rewrite, elimination of tax loopholes and, of course, more taxes on the wealthy. Because Obama's old pal Warren "There's Not Much I Don't Already Own" Buffet doesn't mind.

Remember that "wealth distribution" slip by candidate Obama chatting with Joe the Plumber in 2008?

"This is not class warfare," the president claimed today. "It’s math. The money is going to have to come from someplace." Obama's decision to ratchet up taxes on the wealthy comes as Gallup finds for the first time this month the wealthy's economic confidence is worse than other Americans.

And although Obama didn't have time to mention them, some of those places include the non-wealthy; you'll pay more for airline ticket fees and mortgage fees and new fees for retired military's healthcare, a total of $130 billion in such new "revenue," according to the Associated Press.

The president's ideas now go to that 12-member "super committee" of Congress that has assumed responsibility for starting to fix this fiscal mess that the larger Congress abdicated. It has to come up with the bitter money medicine of cuts and taxes by Thanksgiving so everyone can figure out how much to cut back holiday shopping this year.

And so China's military planners can know how much smaller our defense forces will be.

-- Andrew Malcolm