President Obama is still out campaigning for his tax hike on the rich which if passed will do zero to pay down the deficit or decrease U.S. debt. In fact, if Obama gets the rich to pay just a little more of their "fair share," we'll be able run the federal government for a whopping 7 days if we're lucky. But what happened to the Obama who used to actually talk about debt and portray it as a bad thing? Oh how we long for the good old days. When Bush left office, the National Debt stood at $10 trillion. After Obama's first term, it sits at more than $16 trillion and for each of the past four years, the United States has posted trillion dollar deficits.
Then:
Now, Obama has proposed the following (notice the lack of spending cuts or talk of paying down debt or the deficit):
House Republicans said on Thursday that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner presented the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a detailed proposal to avert the year-end fiscal crisis with $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, an immediate new round of stimulus spending, home mortgage refinancing and a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits. The proposal, loaded with Democratic priorities and short on detailed spending cuts, was likely to meet strong Republican resistance. In exchange for locking in the $1.6 trillion in added revenues, President Obama embraced $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other entitlements, to be worked out next year, with no guarantees. He did propose some upfront cuts in programs like farm price supports, but did not specify an amount or any details.
And senior Republican aides familiar with the offer said those initial spending cuts might well be outnumbered by upfront spending increases, including at least $50 billion in infrastructure spending, mortgage relief, an extension of unemployment insurance and a deferral of automatic cuts to physician reimbursements under Medicare … The upfront tax increases in the proposal go beyond what Senate Democrats were able to pass earlier this year. Tax rates would go up for higher-income earners, as in the Senate bill, but Mr. Obama wants their dividends to be taxed as ordinary income, something the Senate did not approve. He also wants the estate tax to be levied at 45 percent on inheritances over $3.5 million, a step several Democratic senators balked at. The Senate bill made no changes to the estate tax, which currently taxes inheritances over $5 million at 35 percent.
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Moving forward is looking pretty grim.
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