Senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod said that balancing the budget now would be a "bad idea."
Axelrod: After a week of withering attacks on President Obama's fiscal record, top Democrats on Sunday defended the president's plans for shaving down the deficit -- but said balancing the budget now would actually be a bad idea...
"What's necessary is to stabilize the debt and then work from there," he said. "You can't balance the budget in the short term, because to do that would be to ratchet down the economy." (Fox)
Liberals believe that, under normal circumstances, the government should spend a lot of money right along side the private sector. When an economic slump hits the private sector, they believe the government should spend even more, or the economy will suffer.
They're right: The economy will suffer.
Much like a drug addict suffers from withdrawal when he stops taking drugs. It's painful, but it's a necessary first step in recovery--and there's never a "good" time to do it. It will always be painful. Also like a drug user, it will be even more painful if we keep putting off our decision to address our self-destructive habit. A drug user that doesn't go through the painful phase of withdrawal will continue to use drugs and continue to do damage to himself, up to and including death.
Our debt situation is identical.
The Democrats want to keep us on the debt drug... they claim this injection of the debt drug is not only going to make us feel better, it's going to make us better. So much better that, later, we'll be able to live without the drug, and we'll be able to do it painlessly and without withdrawal symptoms. We just need one more hit, right now, and we'll finally get around to addressing our problems later.
The Democrats are debt drug dealers trying to make one more sale.
For the drug user, there's no comfortable time to stop using the drug. And for our politicians, there will be no comfortable time to stop spending. And, honestly, there will be no comfortable time for the citizens.
The truth is that reducing spending is going to hurt. The government has been borrowing money from future generations so that we can have goodies today. We're going to have to live without those goodies, and that's going to take some getting used to. We can either ease into this new reality in a calm and rational way, or we can keep doing what we're doing until our economy crashes into the brick wall of reality as it has been doing in Europe.
Democrats apparently prefer the latter approach.
In nearly four years of an Obama presidency, we're no closer to addressing our surging unemployment, the accelerating bankruptcy of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid's looming collapse, or resolving the fiscal cliff at the end of the year, to say nothing about eliminating the deficit and putting us on a plan to reduce the national debt.
Unemployment is higher than when Obama took office. Obama once said fixing Social Security would be "easy," yet he has done nothing to address it. Obamacare has raided Medicare for $700 billion and done nothing to fix Medicaid. Rather than making any effort to govern, Obama has decided to play chicken on the matter of the fiscal cliff that we face at the end of this year--even though economists from all sides have stressed the need to deal with it. And far from Obama's pledge to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, the deficit continues to exceed a trillion dollars per year while the national debt soars past $16 trillion during the Democratic National Convention.
Meanwhile, senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod crowed about his party's convention, "At least we're 'unified'."
Show me a group of 2000 people that are "unified" about something and I'll show you a group of people that probably isn’t doing much of anything. It's easy to be unified when you're not really working to accomplish anything. Once you endeavor to solve a problem, it's unlikely that 2000 people will agree on how.
So of course Democrats are unified. They're unified in ignoring the reality of our economy and their failed economic policies.
And, no, that is not a good thing.