All In

Now that President Obama has outlined what he advocates and opposes in efforts to reign in the nation’s runaway deficits, the real discussion begins. After painful months of waiting to see if our leaders would begin to address this mess, now we can debate. As partisan and nasty as it all shapes up to be, this is actually good news.

You can’t have a argument when there is only one side, and you can’t reach an agreement with just one party (or branch of government) participating. Now everyone is on the playing field – they’ve all accepted that our national deficits must be addressed.

I still have a concern that the plans will reduce the deficit (Obama $4 trillion, House Republicans $4.4 trillion) which implies that there still will be deficits, only smaller ones. Not that this development isn’t a positive one, but we need to eliminate deficits and reduce debt.

The national debt stands somewhere around $14 trillion. The debt doubled from $6 trillion to almost $12 trillion from 2001-2009 under President George W. Bush – over a trillion of that was in his final year when the economy disintegrated ($800 billion to banks, billions to Wall Street, $180 billion tax stimulus checks, etc.). Then under President Obama came more bailouts along with falling revenues coupled with increasing spending – more than $2 trillion more.

That means that since the nation was running surpluses in 2001, our national debt has increased 133%, for those keeping score at home. We will have to come to a place where the national debt can be significantly reduced.

Right now it sounds like these folks are talking about cutting up six of their ten credit cards, but still plan to run up the bill on the four they have left.

That is not ideal, and it is not where we ultimately need to end up. But, it is a start. All sides now have proposals with merits and demerits that they will be forced to face in the coming months. Let’s hope that the brawl that is about to erupt will bring us closer to a sane taxing and spending policy – because both must be addressed – to save our great nation.

Obama, to curb deficit, urges cuts and more taxes on the rich – Shear (NY Times)

What Barack Obama said, what he meant – Budoff Brown (Politico)