Budget battles threaten to limit Obama's second-term agenda

GOOD!!

Immigration wasn’t even mentioned in the presidential debate, other than directly to that audience, to get their support, at the very end of the campaign, by Obama. He’s a strategist, and his strategies disperse blame efficiently, and he always promises things he can’t do or can blame on someone else later, and he goes around congress to do what he wants, whenever he can. You can sit here a say other people do it too, but is our standard moving forward? We’re just going to let them do what they want, and say someone else did it too, or worse? He isn’t ready to cut our bloated defense budget that is used more so for attacking than defending anything. He’s not ready to stop holding people, even Americans, indefinitely or under unidentified charges. He isn’t ready to do anything to make government smaller or less intrusive. He’s fallen right in line with the previous republican administration on an alarming amount of fronts, especially the avoiding blame, over-reaching, and seemingly dictatorial leadership front. At first he seemed highly intelligent and caring, now he appears to be an avid strategist and manipulator, and doesn’t plan to do anything but reconstruct our society towards his minority agendas, and in-doctrine the killing of foreigners via drones as permanently essential and moral in an American Defense. We may always kill people like that, and the innocents they live with; or just find them, and assassinate them just because it’s easier. Easier than bringing them to justice like we should. I wonder if that strategy backfires too.

Funny The President doesn’t have to do a darn thing

I love how its the preident who spent the funds OLNY Congress gets to apropriate money

Congress spent the money It needs to pay its bills

Life’s a bitch, then you die.

The less he gets done… the better.

Let the border states and Immigration battle it. Gun control begins at home with PARENTS that give a damn about raising their kids right. Change the Harris, Klebolds, Loughners and Lanza’s LOUSEY upbringing of their children. Their are thousands more parents out there like that. Get ready for hundreds of massacres my fellow Americans. 9/11 will seem like a twig when these crazed kids hit the streets. Better we all have guns, so less good people are murdered. No amount of gov’t $ or worthless Bills will change that. Notice assault and semi automatic weapons are selling like hotcakes now? Good yr to be a gun broker.

Gun control is to Democrats as the Tea Party is to Republicans. The Kiss of Death.

Why in the world is it necessary to have an almost none stop series of news conferences spelling out what you won’t do. I’m personally sick and tired of the constant conflict. DO YOUR FREAKIN’ JOB! Which in this case is for the House to get together and craft a bill addressing the debt ceiling issue. Currently they spend more time in front of news camera’s beating on their chests than actually working! Send that bill to the Senate and then negotiate in good faith to send a bill to the president. If you ABSOLUTELY must hold yet another news conference, use it to define exactly what’s in the bill and defend it. Everyone in the world knows that America needs to cut spending..not just entitlement programs but across the board. If the Republicans want Democrats to yield on entitlement programs. Then Republicans must we willing to yield on out of control Defense spending. Pick a freakin’ number for crying out loud..1%, 2%, 3%, 5%? Whatever, and that’s how much every department and every program’s budget in the Federal government gets cut. End of argument. No more sacred cows. Anyone who tries to sell that we can’t find at least 5% in waste in absolutely every government enterprise…is talking BS.

Let the republicans shut down government, but they should think back to the Clinton years before they do.

Instead of cutting entitlements, or education, cut defense spending in half, pull troops from overseas. Serious do we need troops in Europe and Japan? Get rid of Homeland Security, another Bush cash sink.

Guys the next county with the highest gun ownership is Yemen and they have half the number of guns per 100,000. Most people killed with guns, are killed by friends, family member or themselves. The number of people killed by guns in the commission of crimes is small compare to friends and family.

News flash. WASHINGTON LIMITS AMERICA WITH ITS INCOMPETANCE!

Obama got his tax increases. If he wishes to bargain in good faith he will present corresponding budget cuts. Will that happen? No. In fact, the President will try to get every spending increase he can. In light of this, the debt ceiling is the perfect lever for responsible legislators to rein in spending. Why should the threat of downgrade to the US credit rating be any different from yours or mine? If we can’t pay our bills we take a hit- so should the government. The political class needs to learn to play by the same rules as those of the rest of us.

Good, I want to limit his agenda as much as possible until he cuts spending in earnest as his own deficit recommended and as he promised via a “balanced approach”….we’ve got your token tax legislation in place, now where are the spending cuts?

Let’s review for all the Republicans out there. Four years ago, the top priority of the Republican party was to put party politics above the welfare of the United States. How did that go? Oh yeah, another four years of a Democrat in the Presidency and increased congressional Democrat seats because the majority of Americans felt otherwise. Mid-terms are coming up again, so go ahead and drag your feet, again. Throw more Americans under the bus, all to push the narrow minded un-American Republican party partisan politics.

Go ahead and in four years, another Democrat will be elected.

Hummmmm – more than $16,000,000,000,000 and Obama and his friends in the Democratic Party don’t care in the slightest.

Bring our boys home.
Each soldier in Afghanistan costs about one million dollars a year.
And we’ll be safer. We can fix the bridges which might crash, the buildings that might come down and much more urgently needed projects in America.

Bin Laden was trained by us; the Taliban was trained by us, to go against the Russians in Afghanistan.

Which next terrorist group or groups are we going to train next, under the dubious excuse of nation building, or bringing education to their girls? Did we ask the Talibans what their attitude towards women’s education was, when we first trained them and armed them against the Russians? Did we care?

And now we are arming the Japanese who have been running negative propaganda against us, often using naive Americans for decades, whitewashing the prolonged, decades long war crimes in Asia that forced us to drop the A-bomb. The propaganda vilifies Americans, exaggerate the response to one rape while tens of thousands of rapes committed by the Abe’s grandfather’s soldiers in China and in Korea are denied, and the rape victims harassed to be quiet; and in return, our news agencies whitewash their war crimes against humanity from 1890s to 1945, and continual Japanese harassment of anyone who tells their history or documents the truth.

Japan has massacred more Asians since 1890s in Asia, many many times more than any other country by invasion first under the Aryan racist theory, then official as allies of Hitler. And Congress just passed resolution to support Japan’s resurgent neo-Nazis military arming— is that another arming of the next Bin Laden or what?

Stop the military exercises with Japan — that will save another bunch of money.

It’s not immigration that I care foremost to pass; it’s that the gridlock makes the entire country dysfunctional — cannot even quickly dispatch with the aid for hurricane victims. Every issue is a grind.

artvet2..exactly..let’s get rid of those tax and spend democrats…Republican’s in total control of our government would be Soooooooooo much better (review the drunken sailor spending spree of 2000 to 2006 as a reference of the FINE job the Republicans did). Ahhh so you think that’s ancient history..fast forward to 2013. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” which is the House’s 2013 Budget proposal…..cut taxes (disproportionately for the rich), increase Defense spending and gut Medicare and Medicaid. NOW there’s a sound plan!!! While Path tries to paint a rosy picture (ALL those new jobs by cutting taxes on the “job creators”)..the CBO characterized it as “long on promise” and short on specifics. Here’s a news flash for you..it ain’t just Obama and the Democrats that are killing us. In fact is was Republican Vice President Dick Cheney that said “Deficits don’t matter”. Were you posting debt amounts on Reuter comment boards back in those days? Or were you busy waving a flag while Bush et.al led you blindly into two ill-advised wars?

50-odd chuckleheads in the House are holding America hostage.
Obama should call their bluff.

The fiscal cliff deal postpones what has to be done. If Obama wants to rescue his Presidency he has to work towards a balanced budget. It will be hard on everyone but it has to be done. We are starting to see leaks in the dam. The FED is concerned. The world is concerned. This isn’t Keynesian economics it is insanity.

@Xyz2055

You are right it takes a corporate friendly Democrat like Clinton to balance the budget. He raised taxes and cut entitlements and we soared. The golden ages for our modern history was 92-00

This may be a good thing for the average American citizen!

At this point the GOP needs to stop Obama in his tracks. His plans are:

- Raise taxes more.
- Increase spending.
- Promote Cap and Trade.
- Confiscate guns.
- Go green and raise cost of energy.

There is not a single thing that he is looking at doing that will get out country back on a road that leads anywhere execpt financial disaster.

“President Barack Obama’s looming budget confrontation with Congress threatens to sharply curtail his second-term agenda and limit his ambitions on priorities such as immigration reform and gun control.”

Well Mr. Whitesides, provide me with one quote where President Obama said GUN CONTROL was his priority. I know he is looking into the causes of the Newtown shooting, and guns are one part of many causes, and he wants to reinstate the Ronald Reagan era ban on assault weapons and large cap clips, but I do not recall Obama EVER saying gun control was his priority. NEVER.
Are you deliberately misleading, or just mistaken, Mr. Whitesides?

We’re not far away from $25 trillion in debt, and the aftermath will leave all but the Boomers with a very dim future. Mr. President, please, get serious about this issue so we can finally move forward.

He took 51% of the popular vote and thinks he has a mandate to spend our nation into a third world nightmare. Guess again Mr. President…that was not why you won.

Please tell me OWEbama truth teamers on Reuters, how do you explain the blatant hypocrisy from OWEbama himself? You can’t, all you can do it try to quickly shift the blame on someone else, but no need, your MESSiah has already told you where the blame should be cast in his statement.

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies”

I sure don’t see the veto coming from this failure’s office when it comes to running all time record breaking trillion dollar deficits every year.

What happened to jobs are priority one? Oh, wait a minute! He got re-elected. Well, forget that then. On to immigration! Uh, I mean gun control. Uh, I mean green energy. Uh, I need a vacation!

PKFA wrote:
“Obama got his tax increases. If he wishes to bargain in good faith he will present corresponding budget cuts. Will that happen?”

jaham wrote:
“Good, I want to limit his agenda as much as possible until he cuts spending in earnest”

Spending cuts wreck economies. Economic theory predicts that will happen, and real-life experience in Europe proves the theory in action. Wrecked economies do not reduce deficits. They increase them.

Why are you so determined to wreck the US economy?

The ideal answer would be for Obama to issue an executive order and just by-pass the children in Congress.

On the other hand, Republicans being stupid and refusing to pay their bills, wrecking the US economy (which seems to be their plan…) in the process, will pretty much kill them off as a credible political party.

Their childishness over the fiscal cliff, followed by childishness over Sandy, followed by more childishness over the debt limit (which is automatic in all other countries) reveals how unfit they are to be in government and should ensure that they get wiped out in the mid-term elections.

That is the silver lining in the cloud. Less US Republicans is a good thing for everybody.

@Abulafiah

Europe had no choice. They were out of money and couldn’t print their own. We are ruining the dollar. Stagflation is on its way.

@Abulafiah

Tell Obama to issue an executive order. That will have breaking constitutional law. Then he gets impeached and then removed from office. You aaren’t an American are you?

Lets put the Presidents words in another way. Gentlemen we have 3rd stage national debt cancer but my vacations and your pork take precedent over the common sense political surgical treatments required to solve this problem. So lets put it off for just a little awhile- like the end of my second term and besides the only people that might be severely effected by the delay is the middle class and of course none of you are in that category!!

@TheNewWorld

Of course Europe had a choice. They started out well enough with stimulus spending (odd that you don’t know that…) but then Merkel’s insistence on austerity undid it all.

… and you are unable, or don’t want to, learn from that.

Whether an executive order is legal or not is a matter for legal debate. You think it is a clear-cut case because Fox says so, but that is not the case at all. The argument that he can is based on the 14th Amendment.

Abulafiah..the fight in Congress is about “special interest”! All those lobbyists pounding on Congressman not to touch their pie..OR don’t expect campaign funds next election cycle. EVERYBODY knows the right thing to do here is to cut spending across the board. That is exactly what Simpson-Bowles did. In March of 2012 that plan lost miserably in the House. Of the 435 only 28 voted for it. Congress is only interested in THEIR own best interests (getting reelected to the “gravy train”). They have neither the tenacity, integrity nor the courage to do the right thing. That is why the ONLY solution to this mess is for the American people to vote out EVERY incumbent running for re-election in 2014. To this point there have been NO Consequences for them behaving badly. Example? We just voted virtually ALL of them right back into office.

Abulafiah..while Constitutional experts would agree with you (that Executive Order is VERY thinly veiled in the 14th Amendment) of the more than 13,000 issued since 1789…only two have been over turned by the courts.

“Only two Presidential executive orders have been overturned by the courts. The first involved a 1952 presidential order issued by President Truman, Executive Order 1034, placing the nation’s steel mills under federal control in order to prevent labor strikes from affecting steel production and thus hurting the national economy.[1] The U.S. Supreme Court determined that the Truman Order was unconstitutional because it overstepped the boundary between executive and legislative powers, holding that President’s power to issue the order must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution.[2].

The second executive order overturned by a court was issued by President Clinton. Executive Order 12954 prevented the federal government from entering into contracts with organizations that hire replacements for striking employees.[3] The court determined that the Order was regulatory in nature and preempted by the National Labor Relations Act, which guarantees employers the right to hire permanent replacements.[4]“

My Bad! It isn’t the 14th Amendment.

“Although there is no Constitutional provision or statute that explicitly permits executive orders, there is a vague grant of “executive power” given in Article II, Section 1, Clause 1 of the Constitution, and furthered by the declaration “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” made in Article II, Section 3, Clause 5. Most Executive Orders use these Constitutional reasonings as the authorization allowing for their issuance to be justified as part of the President’s sworn duties.”

Many things threaten his second term, his own inabilities not least of all. He is a cheerleader, and activist, but no do-er of deeds. He fell captive to his Left wing, and energized his demoralized and defeated opposition, and O-care will not be a triumph but a red-tape nightmare that will do little but increase costs. He best minds are deserting, determined to not be part of the painful slump to ineffectiveness. He may be a lame-duck before his inauguration. If he had a ‘clear mandate’ he would have a majority in the House. He can compromise with the half of the country that doesn’t agree with him or he can fret, fume, and do nothing.

xyz2055 wrote:
“EVERYBODY knows the right thing to do here is to cut spending across the board.”

Because it worked so well across Europe, right? You seem to think that the whole EU is thriving on those spending cuts.

There is absolutely no similarity between national debt and a credit card. None at all. That comparison is a joke. Nobody is going to force the USA to pay back debts, because nobody has the authority. The kids and grandkids will not be saddled with debt, in exactly the same way that nobody now is paying for the higher debt owed by the USA after WW2. All that kind of stuff is nonsense put around by fools who are completely ignorant of what a sovereign currency is.

They do it just to avoid the discussion about economic growth, which is what the USA should be discussing.

xyz2055 wrote:
“Abulafiah..while Constitutional experts would agree with you (that Executive Order is VERY thinly veiled in the 14th Amendment) of the more than 13,000 issued since 1789…only two have been over turned by the courts.”

The argument that the president can raise the debt limit unilaterally has credit, and so has the related one that to refuse to raise the debt ceiling to cover outstanding debts is itself unconstitutional.

In simple terms, the executive branch of government is obliged to pay for everything authorised by Congress, and if the debt ceiling is not high enough to cover it then the president has no choice but to raise it. If Congress refuse, then they are violating the constitution and can be ignored.

Common sense says that to have a system in which Congress can authorise spending – which is actually issuing instructions to the government to spend money – and then refuse to cover the bills their instructions incur is a ridiculous system.

It makes a lot more sense to interpret the 14th Amendment, clause 4, as meaning that when Congress order the government to spend, the government has to spend even if it means raising the debt ceiling.

Of course, your average wing-nut will not see it like that. They think Obama authorises spending all by himself….

As you say, in real-life it word be hard for the SC to challenge it. They would most likely agree to expanded executive powers, or refuse to hear it for a lack of standing.

Hopefully Obama will grow some balls, but I am not confident. He is not really noted for having balls.

Abulafiah..the reason we have to cut spending is that we are running too high a deficit. The Credit ratings agencies have already threatened to down grade our debt if we don’t get our fiscal house in order. At the rate we are going (continued high deficits) and our credit is downgraded..eventually the interest on the debt will eat up all the money the government takes in. There is an orderly why to solve this problem (Simpson-Bowles). The problem with these guys is they want to cherry pick what gets cut. And they will never get a bill passed that way.

@xyz2055

You are wasting your time with Abulafiah. He/she thinks there is absolutely no repurcussions to not paying back the debt, or making interest payments on our debt. He/she thinks that the government can essentially stiff itself on its treasuries. Yeah, over $2 trillion of our debt is owed to Social Security, but we can just stiff those faceless people and not pay for it. Private investors hold about $1 trillion of the securities. Screw them, there will be no bad effects to the economy if we don’t pay them back. About $2 trillion is held by insurance companies, investment funds, and state and local governments. Screw them too.

@Abulafiah

“There is absolutely no similarity between national debt and a credit card. None at all. That comparison is a joke. Nobody is going to force the USA to pay back debts, because nobody has the authority. The kids and grandkids will not be saddled with debt, in exactly the same way that nobody now is paying for the higher debt owed by the USA after WW2. All that kind of stuff is nonsense put around by fools who are completely ignorant of what a sovereign currency is.

They do it just to avoid the discussion about economic growth, which is what the USA should be discussing.”

As I have stated before, we owe ourselves the vast majority of the money. Who is going to buy treasuries after you are finished screwing the investors? When you take trillions of dollars off of the books of all of the investors, the GDP takes a direct hit. You are completely ignorant of macroeconomics, as evidenced by statements like the above. Yeah, lets not pay back social security. That will be a real popular move for the government to make. Why it even sounds like austerity…

@xyz2055

Say that Obama does issue an executive order to elimanate the debt ceiling. And for the reason you stated it does go through. I could see that passing the Supreme Court as the Debt ceiling is arbitrary. The power of the purse would still belong to Congress, and they can simply decide not to fund what they decide not to fund. I don’t see any way that the President could by pass those Constitutional powers. We have seen the Power of the Purse end the Vietnam war and get us out of Lebanon when Reagan was President.

Even with Abulafiah’s point that the President could force us to pay for obligations, Congress could balance that by not allowing any new obligations for the next budget year. That would mean discretionary spending takes a huge hit. I don’t think that would happen, but it could. When you look at our budget, we bring in enough revenues to cover the mandatory spending. We have a projected revenue of $2.9 trillion and mandatory spending is $2.293 trillion. That would leave $600 billion for discretionary spending. Take out approximately $300 billion for interest payments, and we have $300 billion left for everything else. And we have a balanced budget.

There is another way. And according to an article on CNN Money it is perfectly legal. Obama could instruct the Treasury to mint a $1T denomination platinum coin. Deposit that coin and continue to pay our obligations. Of course there are consequences from creating more money out of this air.

TheNewWorld…try this one on for size..Obama by executive order raises the Debt Ceiling. His argument would be that Congress has in fact already authorized it since they passed the spending bills that created it. If Congress wanted to limit the debt ceiling, then they would need to pass legislation that cuts spending bringing it down to what ever level they decide on. It seems to me that the Debt Ceiling is really a function of the Budget. Which the President has literally no control of.

@TheNewWorld

Leaving aside the fact that SS is solvent for at least the next 20 years, please tell us – in which alternative reality do you imagine that one government department is going to take another government department to court and demand all its money back?

@TheNewWorld

Leaving aside the fact that SS is solvent for at least the next 20 years, please tell us – in which alternative reality do you imagine that one government department is going to take another government department to court and demand all its money back?

xyz2055 wrote:
“Abulafiah..the reason we have to cut spending is that we are running too high a deficit.”

Too high according to who – the GOP? Those financial geniuses who wrecked the economy?

The USA has had higher deficits in the past. The UK ran higher deficits through most of the 50s and 60s. Several countries are running higher deficits right now. In no case did the sky fall on their heads.

You should ignore the GOP. Their ideas do not match reality.

xyz2055 wrote:
“The Credit ratings agencies have already threatened to down grade our debt if we don’t get our fiscal house in order.”

No they haven’t. They have threatened to downgrade the credit rating if Republican start acting like jerks over the debt ceiling again.

That is nothing to do with the deficit or debt or anything else. It is because Republican obstruction is preventing the economy from recovering.

xyz2055 wrote:
“At the rate we are going (continued high deficits) and our credit is downgraded..eventually the interest on the debt will eat up all the money the government takes in.”

Nonsense. Japan has twice the debt level of the USA, and so did the UK post WW2. It did not/is not eating up all the money the government takes in.

xyz2055 wrote:
“There is an orderly why to solve this problem (Simpson-Bowles). The problem with these guys is they want to cherry pick what gets cut. And they will never get a bill passed that way.”

Simpson – Bowles was rejected, for good reasons. Most of the people who say *now* that they think it is great, do not actually know what is in it.

Simpson-Bowles raised taxes on everybody earning over $250,000 a year. How many so-called S-B fans supported that?

It raise a lot of other taxes too – around $2.6 trillion over the next ten years. That includes taxing capital gains and dividends as normal income. While I can support the latter, this is why Republicans rejected it. To put a perspective on that, it is more than the increased tax revenue suggested by Boehner and Obama combined.

It has a tax hike/spending cut ration of around 1:1. $2.9 trillion in cuts and $2.6 trillion in increased taxes.

The spending cuts include $1.4 trillion cut from defence, which is why neither Republicans nor Democrats will support it.

Where you aware that Paul Ryan voted against it? It is so hypocritical of the right to reject Simpson-Bowles, and then start whining at Obama for doing the same thing, but that pretty much sums up the right.