In Saturday’s column, Washington Post columnist Dan Balz offers a somewhat thoughtful analysis of Obama’s leadership on economic issues since his inauguration and raises a few questions for both parties and the public to consider.
I stayed with Balz for the most part throughout the piece, but he lost me toward the end when he joined most of the punditry, whether liberal or conservative, by taking the intellectually lazy route and lumping Social Security and Medicare with all other government domestic programs under the derogatory term “entitlements.”
To add insult to injury, he actually credited Paul Ryan for his budgetary assault on the nation’s elderly and the poor.
(One would hope that Balz will eventually glance at the deductions on his payroll check stub and become aware that he’s been paying into the Social Security trust fund over the years. He might want to ask what the government has been doing with that money.)
In any case, Balz begins by noting Obama’s twists and turns on the dance floor in Washington as he bows first to the left and then to the right:
In his first two years, President Obama pursued an agenda that dramatically increased government spending and ushered in the biggest change in social welfare policy since the Great Society. When he spoke to the country late Friday night, he sounded like a born-again budget cutter.
Americans may ask which is the real Obama, the politician who embraced the biggest stimulus package in the nation’s history, a bailout of the banks and a takeover of the automobile industry, or the one who on Friday hailed the new budget deal as including “the largest annual spending cut in our history.”
Nervous Democrats fear that Obama gave away too much in the last-minute agreement that averted a government shutdown. They worry even more about the coming fights over raising the debt ceiling and particularly Obama’s response to the budgetary blueprint outlined last week by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).
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