Standing before a staged backdrop of firefighters and other emergency personnel, Obama predicted doom, gloom and sky falling catastrophe if Congress allows the sequestration his White House designed to actually occur 10 days from now:
“Now, if Congress allows this meat-cleaver approach to take place, it will jeopardize our military readiness; it will eviscerate job-creating investments in education and energy and medical research. …
“Emergency responders like the ones who are here today — their ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded. Border Patrol agents will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed. Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go. Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays at airports across the country. Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off. Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find childcare for their kids. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings. …
“So these cuts are not smart. They are not fair. They will hurt our economy. They will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls. This is not an abstraction — people will lose their jobs. The unemployment rate might tick up again.”
In the speech this morning, he also repeated the laughable claim that deficits have already been cut $2.5 trillion and we are half way to a goal of a $4 trillion deficit reduction. Of course that requires some voodoo math to arrive at those figures.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
The bottom line is that on the day Obama was inaugurated the federal debt was $10.6 trillion. As of this past week, it was $16.5 trillion.
But somehow the sequestration’s automatic cut of $85 billion — a rounding error in federal spending as many call it, since the federal government spends $10.5 billion a day — will portend death, destruction and brimstone.
Never mind that he recently signed off on $61 billion in federal relief for Hurricane Sandy without so much as blinking an eye.
And while he wailed about “tax loopholes and deductions for the well off,” he also signed the fiscal cliff deal that contained nearly $70 billion in tax breaks and loopholes for wind turbines, Nascar, asparagus growers, Hollywood producers and the makers of electric scooters. That deal also cut the sequestration figure from $109 billion to $85 billion.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
And it does not look like the Congress is going to help him very much.
The Democrats think the “cuts” will force the Republicans to raise taxes while the Republicans think this is the only way they will get any thing that resembles spending cuts. And Obama thinks the public is still receptive to yet another ginned up crisis enough to make us light a fire under Congress’s posterior.
Good like to the street hustler, his mogo is nogo.
Fumble fingers me. “like” should be “luck”
Add street entertainer to street hustler, he always adds a posed backdrop to his act, seeming to believe that adding a few dozen individuals fittingly costumed to his subject adds gravitas. It obviously hasn’t occurred to him that all the failures he describes will acrue to him because he has made the Congress largely irrelevant. The media feigned concern that he didn’t allow them to watch him playing golf but it was just another means to keep him in the news; that while his handlers and writers conjured up a speech telling the nation’s workers they are enroute to the poorhouse. That was a few hours after leaving an exclusive golf course, not one of those in the backdrop would be allowed on the grounds or anywhere near him in any other public setting.
Unfortunately, anyone that reaches across the aisle will be labeled a traitor by the extremists that are the ones calling the shots. We can look forward to at least 2 years of stalemate while our nation goes down the tubes.
To be principled is NOT traitorous. If only the Ø crowd would state what their objectives truly are! (the destruction of America as a free nation)
Perhaps I misused the word traitor. If the Obama crowd is out to destroy America, I’m hard pressed to believe that you don’t think that those who cooperate with them deserve severe criticism. Am I wrong?
You are quite correct. And Jumping John MacShamnesty is proof positive that you can be an R and still sell out your nation (definition of a traitor, yes?)
As long as the base for both parties stays as rigid as you are, our nation will continue its decline. Our politics mirrors the feud of the Hatfields and McCoys. The results will be no better for us than they were for them.