President Obama will struggle to avoid the second-term curse
December 22, 2012 at 6:00 pm in Duluth News Tribune
Author F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Continue Reading
President Obama will struggle to avoid the second-term curse
32 Comments
I’m more concerned about how the United States has been cursed with his presidency.
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The first term curse of Obama wasn’t much fun either.
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I wonder if Obama looks at deficit cuts as a curse.
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Could it be that Obama sees freedom as a curse?
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The United States is doubly cursed as Biden is the vice-president.
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I wonder how we will look at the Obama curse after four more years of it?
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I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama looks at fiscal responsibility as a curse.
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The curse of the Obama presidency is setting a new standard for bumbling.
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The Obama presidency, the curse that lasts the whole year through.
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This webpage is cursed with comments that were so well thought-out, it took less than a minute to post each of them
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There are likely others supporting the Obama curse that will disparage truth.
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President Obama is flying home today, from another in a multitude of vacations, to promote his fiscal curse,
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I agree with most on here, we are the ones cursed with his second term.
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Taz- You agree with most on here? Which one? There’s only two posters and one of them posted once and the other 11 times…8 of them on Christmas day..in under 75 minutes…
I agree with Merv, this thread is cursed.
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I agree, Obama and his supporters have cursed it.
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not that he could solve our budgetary and deficit problems in one additional term but in the “nixon to china” type mode he would awaken to the realization that we must get our financial house in order, he could put us at least on a path to eliminating budget deficits that could then lead to stabilizing the national debt. this would have him going
down in history as one of our great presidents. i would suggest a modest across the board cut ( there is a little waste in every department no matter what its importance) followed by a real 1% a year in prioritized cuts to spending for starters. so far though no indications…..
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I agree with your last sentence but the Obama curse will insure the first sentence won’t happen.
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@janders50
Actually, what you are describing is basically the “cliff.”
The “cliff” involves:
Tax increases:
* Reversion to the Clinton era tax rates
* Expiration of the temporary cut in payroll taxes
* Reversion of the AMT to the 2000 levels
* Taxes associated with Obamacare (by far the smallest of the four tax increases)
Spending cuts:
* Expiration of the temporary extension of unemployment benefits past the normal limits
* The end of the Medicare increased payment extension (Medicare has set rates so low that Congress has to routinely agree to temporarily increase payments to keep doctors in the plan — one of the reasons no for-profit business can ever come close to being competitive with Medicare)
* Across the board cuts in discretionary spending, much of it coming from Defense
So, here’s the problem. Republicans talk about wanting to make cuts. Thats great, but 60% of our discretionary spending is in Defense, which Republicans don’t want to cut (and to be fair, Obama hasn’t tried to cut defense either). Neither Republicans or Democrats want to be seen to be cutting benefits for seniors. Which is where you get all the Nixon to China rhetoric since they argue Obama could make such cuts.
Problem is, Social Security is in very good shape well into the future. So, it really comes down to Medicare. And we now have Obamacare. So, cutting Medicare benefits simply shifts the cost to companies AND as with any such shift, it will have negative side effects. Shifting the age of Medicare up means people will be hanging on to their jobs longer and companies will have to pay for benefits for more expensive workers, which gives further incentives to get rid of older employees. PLUS, every politician is afraid of the elderly vote, so they all make such changes come into effect well into the future. I think Rush, many years ago, captured the fundamental problem of having individuals be “personally responsible” for their retirement and health care. Such an approach requires the rest of us to deal with those individuals who are not responsible (grandma needs expensive healthcare but can no longer hang on to a job paying for that healthcare) by letting them make use of private charity or simply not getting healthcare. And of course, as our history has repeatedly shown, both approaches fail catastrophically. So, we all get soft and want to solve these problems, leading to government intervention.
Anyways, to bring a very long comment to an end, if we really wanted a Nixon to China moment we would have needed to elect Mitt Romney. Then he could have provided leadership in modestly raising taxes (back to the Clinton era) while also majorly cutting defense. Combined with how quickly the deficit is dropping due to the upturn in the economy we could be back at balanced very quickly. Instead, we need some Republican leadership from Congress, and thats not happening. So we have to muddle through.
Or we could just accept the “cliff.”
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The curse is there will be no cuts in spending. Democrats suckered George H. W. Bush into thinking there was going to be unspecified spending cuts after he agreed to the tax increase. They never happened.
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Actually what Mitt vowed as campaign promise was the complete opposite of what you stated. He said would not only keep the current tax cuts but cut an additional 20% out of taxes while also vowing, despite extracting from two wars, to increase the DOD budget. How he would do that is a mystery…but Repubs seem to dwell in some kinda fantasyland. George W. Bush vowed that we’d end up with a 5 trillion surplus when inacted the wealthy tax cuts in 2001. At this time since economy not fully recovered what Mitt proposed was beyond some wild pipe dream, it would have been an utter disaster that would make the last Republican caused economic meltdown of 2007-08 look like easy street.
Republican leadership isn’t the problem, it’s that Republicans don’t have a clue about the economy or lowering the deficit. They in fact always increased spending and increased the deficit as well as size of government. It’s a falsehood propaganda that is Dem trait. Look it up, since Reagan, Repubs have increased the spending at more then double the rate Democrats have. Repubs then likewise increased the deficit and Dems have shrunk it.
The best thing the Repubs could do is just get out of the way and stop stonewalling everything…..THAT is the curse we’ve all suffered for economically.
“Let’s be blunt and acknowledge the biggest threat to the world’s biggest economy are the cranks and crazies that have taken over the Republican Party,” Australian Deputy PM. Wayne Swan, one of few world leaders able to boast his country had avoided recession during the global financial crisis
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No point responding to “smart”imus. Think about it. I gave him the opening. He could say something, anything about what should be cut, and like the Republicans, he’s got nothing. Nothing at all.
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I guess you didn’t read my acclaimation of janders50′s second sentence. You’ve been cursed with only seeing what you want to see as is common with Obama worshipers.
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“Across the board” is the fiscal cliff, as I pointed out. We cannot, without changing the laws involved, cut mandatory spending. So, that leads to across the board cuts in discretionary spending, and any cuts would land 60% on defense. *I* am fine with that. Many progressives and liberals are fine with that. Lets do it. Heck, lets cut defense spending by 10% every year for 5 years and bring our troops home from Iraq, Afghanistan, Germany, Korea, Japan, etc.. Budget balanced, done. Problem is, the massive defense cuts have the Republicans terrified (not sure why, we spend more than the next 50 countries combined on defense, and almost all of them are our allies). If we cut our defense spending by 50% we would still be spending more than the next 8 countries combined. I realize that defense spending at this point is a massive jobs program, but there are probably more productive ways to spend vast sums of money to create jobs. So, heck, lets just go over the fiscal cliff.
So, again “smart”imus, got ANYTHING?? Can you identify any discretionary spending that there is actual support for cutting (heck, can you identify anything other than defense that makes up a significant part of our discretionary spending)?? Republicans certainly can’t (Mitt Romney could never identify where the cuts would be made, Boehner gave a “plan” with nebulous cuts but no specifics — and when pressed couldn’t say where, etc.). NO Republican can come up with anything in cuts outside of shifting medical costs to the private sector (which we would still end up paying for — as we do now with medical expenses for the poor). And they make the cuts so far in the future that we would still see massive deficits for the forseeable future because they are afraid of seniors. This is the courage of Republicans — beg the Democrats to solve the problem. As they always end up doing.
*This* is our fundamental problem. Close to 40% of the electorate in this country is so divorced from reality that they think somehow there is a secret solution that perhaps Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity nows for balancing the budget and Democrats simply don’t want to do it. They assume that the “facts” that the conservative entertainment complex give them are the truth. Until they actually start living in the real world we will be held hostage by the willfully ignorant.
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No there are about 51 percent that are Obama curse supporters that are divorced from reality. The democrats are not going to allow any cuts in anything so cuts are a moot point.
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I thought there was no point in responding to me RickM, but yet you do again. The Obama curse will do that to you.
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issue needs to be taken with the poster who indicated that “social security is in very good shape well into the future”. with the social security “fix” back in the 80′s it was
supposed to be stabilized until 2043. now that date has been changed to 2038 and i will go out on a limb based on some current demographics i have been reading and say that this will be shortened to 2033. the trend is not our friend just as with many other government retirement plans(federal,state,local) there is a massive unfunded liability. the antithesis of murphy’s law is “if something can’t happen it won’t happen”
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This is depressing. Thats what you got from my comment? We are talking *at least* 20 years in the future based on current projections, which fits what I said.
So, let me get this straight, we are running large deficits, defense spending is roughly 24% of our federal budget (the projected federal deficit is actually almost exactly the defense budget), medicare has serious issues in just the next 5 years, and you want to talk about social security?? The program is good, using current projections, for at least 20 years. And that is based on very modest growth projections. If we grow faster than the current projections then the date goes out much further.
Does that mean we shouldn’t look at the issue? Sure, we should, but it is not a top priority. How to solve the Social Security issue? Well the shortfall estimates indicate that we would need to raise the payroll tax about 1.5 percentage points to guarantee the SS fund for 75 years (this would also address Medicare). We could also look at a lesser increase and include things like means testing and raising the age (though the latter has the same problems Rush pointed out and the former is hard for politicians to contemplate). We could also look at the payroll tax. When conservatives talk about the 47 (really 46%) they are (well, the smart ones are) careful to state that this number relates to federal INCOME tax. This is because the federal income tax is progressive (the more you make, the higher your percentage). BUT, the payroll tax is regressive, lower income people pay a much higher percentage of their income in this tax. The payroll tax for an individual is 1.45% of their income plus 6.2% of their income up to $110,100. So, a person making up to $110,100 pays 7.65% of their income in payroll taxes. A person making $500,000 pays just 2.8% of their income in payroll taxes. A person making $1,000,000 pays 2.1%, a person making $10,000,000 pays 1.5%, etc. We could simply eliminate the $110,100 number and make payroll taxes a flat tax (everybody pays the same rate). That raises roughly $300B a year and SS and Medicare are no longer an issue. We might even be able to lower the overall rate slightly.
But that would be a tax on the folks who make more in this country, and everyone knows those are the folks who create the jobs.
There is a reason no conservative politician ever veers far from talking about federal INCOME taxes. If you look at the total tax situation (taking into account everything) the actual taxes paid are only slightly progressive: 17.3% for the bottom 20%, 21.2% for the next 20% (20-40), 25.2% for the next 20% (40-60), 29.5% for the next 20 percent (60-80), 30.4% for the next 15 percent (80-95), 31.5% for the next 4 percent (95-99), and 29% for the top 1 percent. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/19/heres-why-the-47-percent-argument-is-an-abuse-of-tax-data/ .
So, should we be thinking about Social Security? Yes. As a long term issue. But does it matter as much as our deficit, our bloated defense budget and our medicare issues right now? No.
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Social Security contributes to the deficit no less than any other budget item. It is very telling that the Obama cursed don’t understand that.
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The only way to get any spending cuts is to go over the Obama curse. If Obama wants to present tax cuts after the fact there is nothing stopping him but it won’t happen. If the Obama curse supporters or the republicans want to restore funding at a higher level to some programs that can be done too.
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@”smart”imus
So, you are saying you don’t know how the budget works. SS and Medicare are paid for through payroll taxes, the money then placed in a trust fund that is supposed to pay out benefits. The number of years we are talking about are the estimates for how long before those trust funds expire. So, for example, when the recent reduction of the payroll tax for two years was passed, the law also noted for accounting purposes that the corresponding amount of money was officially transferred from the general fund.
Look, if you don’t even understand the basics you may want to follow that old adage and not expose yourself by speaking (or in this case posting). Though your choice of handle and your postings represent a wonderful illustration of irony.
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The fact is that the money taken in from payroll deductions for Social Security and Medicare go into the general fund. There is no “trust fund” but there is a scam fund of iou’s for the money that has been stolen from those two programs. The only reason these two programs are claimed to be solvent is they still collect more money than is paid out in benefits but the surplus is spent for other purposes. The year claimed as the end year when these programs become insolvent just means that at that time less money will be coming in from payroll deductions than is being paid out. The Obama curse unfortunately isn’t too conducive for leftists to be engaged in the realm of reality. I will accept in advance your thanks for a dose of reality administered by me.
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One person doesn’t like the truth. I wonder who that could be?
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