Last week, President Barack Obama addressed the State of the Union and told everyone that we need to “Win the future.” In a display of leadership, he touched upon many of the issues that are currently facing our great nation.
The downside was that despite his leadership skills and his ability to create an illusion of bipartisan eagerness, our Congress is poised to be an ineffective one.
The most pressing issue for our nation is the budget, and our enormous deficit that is ever growing. Obama’s plan for the economy is to invest in domestic projects and alternative energy sources. This won’t be easy and is less foreseeable when at the same time the president is proposing a 5-year domestic spending freeze.
Another factor that will surely work against any of his investment ideas or plans for growth is the attitude and control of the Republican majority within the House of Representatives.
Republicans have labeled anything that is said to be an investment as something wasteful. Increasing research among any of our promising technologies for the future or spending more on domestic infrastructure will be impossible if the Republicans continue their policy of saying no.
Reaching reasonable solutions to any of the other issues Obama spoke of last Tuesday isn’t likely when you look at what the other side has to offer as far as ideas.
Rep. Paul Ryan from Wisconsin gave the rebuttal to the president’s address. Ryan hammered relentlessly on the topic of the economy and the deficit.
Ryan, who is the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, spoke mainly of Obama’s stimulus and healthcare bill.
“All of this new government spending was sold as ‘investment,’” Ryan said. “Yet after two years, the unemployment rate remains above 9 percent and government has added over $3 trillion to our debt.”
As the newest Republican poster boy, look for Ryan to label anything that Obama speaks of as investment as something poisonous and wrong for the country.
The rest of his party will follow suit. Of course their solution to the economic problems is to cut spending and decrease the size of government.
How do they plan to do this? Well, the truth is, they don’t know either. All they know is that anything Obama does is sure to be our country’s downfall, and what he’s passed so far hasn’t worked.
Good point, but at this point there's no reason to like the Dems or GOP. Both are too selfish, too entrenched in beating the opposing team like it's some kind of sick game, that they'll refuse to work or fix anything until the opposition is utterly defeated. They'll do this at the risk of making the country, our economy, and everything in general WORSE. Which, if you look around, is a mission accomplished.
The liberal progressive Democrats in Congress were telling the public that the Republicans are spending too much money in the 2006 election cycle. If you take noticed the deficit in the last year that the Republicans control Congress was only $161 billion and the very first year 2007 the Democrats got control of the purse strings, democrats pushed that up to $458 billion this was an all time record high.
This did not include spending for the wars we are in or other off budget deficit spending. If we add off budget spending the total deficit for 2008 was $979 billion. This was not all from the cost of the 2 wars we were in. This 2008 budget was supposed to be voted on by April 15, 2007 four months after Democrats took control of the House and Senate.
http://tiny.cc/i2260
To clarify this explanation by April 15, 2008 they increase the top line spending an additional $535 billion which brings the total increase in additional on budget spending to $789 billion from April 15, 2007 to April 15, 2008 and only been in office for 16 months. In the same period of time the on and off budget deficit for that same time period was $979 billion very close to $1 trillion increase in total yearly government spending in just 16 months. The Democratic Party and the president keep trying to blame this on the Republican Party, but most of this deficit spending came about before as in prior to the bank collapsed in September of 2008.
The total on budget deficit and off budget deficit for the fiscal year 2010 was $1.9 trillion for those that think doing more of this kind of spending is going to somehow bring the economy back to prosperity needs to rethink what they think they know and come up with a better answer than just spending more money. Presidents cannot spend one dime without first that spending originating out of the House of Representatives. That is the way it was set up in the Constitution and it hasn't been changed.
http://tiny.cc/i2260