OBAMA THROWS DOWN THE POLITICAL GAUNTLET ON DEFICIT FIGHT TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!

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OBAMA THROWS DOWN THE POLITICAL GAUNTLET ON DEFICIT FIGHT TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!

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Started 1 year ago by Checker
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Checker

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Joined: Apr '11
Posts: 6,267

In a remarkable act of political gauntlet-throwing, President Obama castigated House Speaker John Boehner
for his approach to reducing the country’s deficit, called on Members
of Congress to do what’s “right” when it comes to debt reduction and
issued a veto threat if a bill that does not meet his standards comes to
his desk.

Obama’s speech, which was ostensibly aimed at previewing his deficit
reduction plan, spent far more time — and rhetorical energy — on shaping
the lines of the political fight to come.

“This is not class
warfare, it’s math,” Obama said in response to early Republican
critiques of his proposal. At another point he said that GOP members
should be “called out” for signing a pledge not to raise taxes ever.

But
Obama saved his choicest words for Boehner. Obama said the Speaker had
“walked away from a balanced package” during the debt-ceiling
negotiations and added that Boehner’s approach to debt reduction was
“not smart...it’s not right”.

From a rhetorical perspective, the speech felt decidedly similar to Obama’s address previewing the American Jobs Act to a joint session of Congress earlier this month.

What
that means, wethinks, is that Obama has given over the idea of being
the compromiser-in-chief — the prevailing sentiment of the first eight
months of 2011 — in favor of taking the fight to Republicans and forcing
them to respond in kind or feel the political consequences.

(As we wrote in a piece this morning, Obama is picking a political fight on his strongest possible political ground at the moment.)

And respond they did.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
(Ky.) derided the “veto threats, a massive tax hike, phantom savings,
and punting on entitlement reform” he said were in the President’s
speech and, further sticking in the rhetorical knife, added that “the
good news is that the Joint Committee is taking this issue far more
seriously than the White House.”

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called the speech “a thinly-veiled attempt to score political points”.

For
lovers of grand bargains, don’t hold your breath. The ramped-up
rhetoric makes clear that the debate over how/when/where to reduce the
country’s deficit has moved from the policy realm (if if was ever really
there) into the political one.

The 2012 election may still be 14 months away but the central debate on which it will pivot began in earnest this morning.

Read more on PostPolitics.com

Boehner responds

Rep. Ryan says plan is class warfare

Debt plan clashes with GOP vision

Ryan calls Obama’s tax plan ‘class warfare’

SOURCE

Posted 1 year ago #
Checker

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Posts: 6,267

Link to article written by Steve Benen before the speech

President Obama will present his debt-reduction plan in about a
half-hour, and by all indications, it’s going to be a pretty ambitious,
progressive approach. I’ll explore the plan in more detail once it’s
released, but in the meantime, there’s one position in particular that’s worth pausing to appreciate.

President Barack Obama will veto a comprehensive deficit
reduction package if it includes cuts to entitlement program benefits
but no tax hikes on the wealthy or well-to-do corporations, senior
advisers said on Sunday.

The veto threat is an addendum of sorts to a $3 trillion-plus set
of deficit reduction proposals that the White House will make to the
congressional super committee tasked with comprehensive deficit
reduction. But if administration officials are to be believed, it is now
a principle by which the committee must act and it raises the specter
of gridlock. Just last week, House Speaker John Boehner insisted that
tax hikes should be off the table.

“[W]hat the president is saying is he is not doing [beneficiary
reforms] if the Republicans are unwilling to ask the wealthiest
Americans and biggest corporations to pay their fair share,” explained a
senior administration official. “What they can’t do is send something
to us with the things we propose and without the stuff on the revenue
side because we will veto that.”

By all accounts, the veto threat was explicit. This isn’t a White House asking Congress to balance revenue and entitlement cuts; this isn’t a White House urging Congress to balance revenue and entitlement cuts; this isn’t a White House hoping
Congress will balance revenue and entitlement cuts. This is the
president throwing down a gauntlet: if Republicans want to make
entitlements “reforms” that affect benefits, they’re going to have to
accept some tax increases on the wealthy. If seniors are going to be
asked to make some sacrifices, the wealthy are going to be asked to do
the same.

Period. Full stop.

President Obama and his team are generally reluctant to throw around
veto threats precisely because they don’t like to close doors to
potential areas of compromise down the road. But that’s what makes this
all the more striking: Republicans are generally obsessed with
establishing the terms of the debate before the process even begins.
Today, it’s the Obama White House deciding it’s time to turn the tables.

I sure hope the president’s detractors on the left are watching this: he’s doing what they’ve long urged him to do.

Posted 1 year ago #
Bumpy

senior member
Joined: Dec '10
Posts: 2,743

yeah well......................i'll believe it when i see it.

just got home and heard about the President's speech. a speech means NOTHING to me at this point !!!!

....what he does over the next few months ( FIGHTS OR FOLDS ) will mean a lot more than some speech.

i'm trying to work with the President and being as patient as i can be, but his "great speeches" and then FOLDING LIKE A CHEAP WALLET has been going on for three f' kn years !!!!!

sick of the speeches. what he does, and how he ACTS, when the gop puts the pressure on his jobs plan, is all i'm interested in.

Posted 1 year ago #
Hoodie

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Posts: 2,510

Next thing you know, Obama's limo will be sportin' truck nuts! Let's hope he sticks to his guns.

Posted 1 year ago #
Checker

senior member
Joined: Apr '11
Posts: 6,267

Ye of little faith.....geez!

Posted 1 year ago #
Bumpy

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Joined: Dec '10
Posts: 2,743

make no mistake. i hope i'm 100 PERCENT WRONG on this.

.....but i got the repubs breaking the bill down to nothing except CUTS for the middle class and poor, then coming with some lameazz excuse about "we'll deal with the taxes of the wealthy and infrastructure funding "later"".

then the President signing off on that bullchit. like i said, i hope i'm wrong.

Posted 1 year ago #
Checker

senior member
Joined: Apr '11
Posts: 6,267

Bumpy,

Have ever heard Obama threaten the VETO before today?

Posted 1 year ago #
Black Lion

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Joined: Jan '11
Posts: 16,847

A Call for Fairness

This time, President Obama did not compromise with himself beforehand, or put out a half measure in hopes of luring nonexistent Republican support. This time, he issued an unabashed call for economic fairness in cutting the federal deficit, asking as much from those on the economy’s upper rungs as from those lower down whose programs may be trimmed.

And this time, standing in the Rose Garden on Monday, he seemed to speak directly to a public that has been parched for farsighted leadership in Washington. The one troubling note of the day was Mr. Obama’s failure to provide enough specifics on some of his proposals, and his aides’ inexplicable continued faith in the idea of Congress working out a sensible middle ground on taxes.

But the president’s plan to cut $3.6 trillion from the deficit over the next 10 years is a well-proportioned mix. It proposes about 60 percent spending cuts (including winding down two wars that his predecessor started fighting off the books with the eager support of the supposedly fiscally responsible Republicans in Congress) and 40 percent tax increases on the wealthy and corporations.

It pays for the desperately needed jobs plan he sent to Congress last week without more mindless hacking at government programs, and would be a much better alternative to the $1.2 trillion in across-the-board spending cuts that loom if Congress does not pass a debt plan this year.

Republicans will, of course, mount obdurate opposition in Congress, since they have no intention of allowing the government to ask anything from the wealthy and corporations. Even before the plan was announced, the party’s leaders had rolled out their rusted artillery, calling an increase in taxes on high earners “class warfare” and insisting that it would fatally wound “job creators.” (In fact, less than 2 percent of the nation’s small businesses would be affected by the tax increases.)

For once the president did not let that predictable line of argument stop him, and even had a good rejoinder: “This is not class warfare. It’s math. The money is going to have to come from someplace.” It could come from the middle class, from the elderly and the poor, by asking them to give up benefits from programs like Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps — as many Republicans are advocating. It could come by pulling money from road building, schools, food inspection and other vital government services.

Those are unacceptable choices, he said, particularly if the rich give up nothing, and he made it clear he would veto any plan that cut Medicare but did not raise revenue from the rich. He called for Congress to rewrite the tax code to ensure that the rich pay the same effective tax rate on their income as the middle class. (He referred to Warren Buffett, who famously said on our Op-Ed page that his secretary pays a higher rate than he does.) It’s time Washington fought as hard for the middle class, he said, as lobbyists fight for billionaires and corporations.

That’s the kind of language Mr. Obama needs for the campaign trail next year, to draw a strong comparison with Republicans who may well start to be seen as fighting for the interests of a small moneyed elite.

But the president would have done better to tell Congress precisely how the Buffett Rule should work, instead of laying out broad principles and hoping a divided and leaderless group of lawmakers would figure it out themselves. As he did during the debt ceiling fight, he called for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for families making more than $250,000 (which would bring in $866 billion over a decade) and limiting the same group’s itemized deductions (saving $410 billion). But as Mr. Buffett has pointed out, most millionaires benefit from an extremely generous 15 percent tax rate on investment income. Mr. Obama should have explicitly called for an increase in that rate.

White House aides have said the president is open to other methods of equalizing the burden, including changing the alternative minimum tax — which now affects many middle-class taxpayers — to apply specifically to millionaire-level income, and at a much higher rate.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the administration did not want to give Congress a detailed road map of tax reform, but that will leave the field to special-interest lobbying, partisan fear-mongering and dithering. Raising capital-gains taxes is the most reliable way to make sure the richest Americans don’t avoid taxes.

On the spending side, the president’s plan takes a sensible approach toward saving money in Medicare and Medicaid. More than 90 percent of the $248 billion in Medicare cuts over 10 years would come from reducing payments to drug companies and health care providers that are unnecessarily high. The effect on the elderly would be limited, with higher premiums for high-income beneficiaries starting in 2017, and increased deductibles for new beneficiaries. Mr. Obama proposed a modest cut of $66 billion in Medicaid over a decade, well below the Republicans’ proposed $770 billion cut.

Mr. Obama also asked military retirees to pay increased contributions for health benefits, bringing that expensive system more in line with private-sector plans.

After nearly three years of destructive compromise and concession on the budget, this plan was far too late in coming. But the public is listening now, and has demanded shared sacrifice. The burden is now on Mr. Obama to sell his plan, and on Congress to buy it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/opinion/a-call-for-fairness.html?_r=1&ref=opinion?hp

Posted 1 year ago #
Black Lion

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Joined: Jan '11
Posts: 16,847

Obama’s tax plan is common sense, not class warfare

By Eugene Robinson, Published: September 19

“Class warfare!” scream the Republicans, in a voice usually reserved for phrases such as “Run for your lives!”

Spare us the histrionics. The GOP and its upper-crust patrons have been waging an undeclared but devastating war against middle-class, working-class and poor Americans for decades. Now they scream bloody murder at the notion that long-suffering victims might finally hit back.

President Obama’s proposal to boost taxes for the wealthy by $1.5 trillion over the next decade is a good first step toward reforming a system in which billionaire hedge-fund executives are taxed at a lower rate than are their chauffeurs and private chefs.

Republicans whine that, since they oppose raising taxes on the rich — and control the House of Representatives, which can block such legislation — Obama’s proposal should be seen as political, not substantive. This is just a campaign initiative, they say, not a “serious” plan to address the nation’s financial and economic woes.

But that’s pure solipsism: Whatever does not fit the GOP’s worldview is, by definition, illegitimate. By this standard, Obama could propose only measures that are in the Republican Party’s platform — which obviously would defeat the purpose of being elected president as a progressive Democrat in the first place.

Outside of the Republican echo chamber, polls consistently show the American people consider unemployment to be the nation’s most urgent problem, not deficits and debt. Obama was on target with the American Jobs Act he proposed this month; the only question was what took him so long.

Americans do have long-term concerns about debt, however, and by large margins they see an obvious solution: a balanced combination of spending cuts and tax increases. In other words, they want precisely the kind of approach that House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) rejected during the debt-ceiling fight — and that he vows to reject again.

Why did Republicans begin squawking about class warfare even before Obama had a chance to announce his proposals? Because by calling on the rich to pay “their fair share” of taxes, the president has hit upon a clear and simple way to illustrate how unequal and unfair our society has become.

Since the beginning of the Reagan years, the share of total income captured by the top 1 percent of earners has doubled while the share taken by the bottom 80 percent has fallen. The rich are getting richer at the expense not only of the poor but of the middle class as well.

Studies demonstrating this trend tend to be dry and, let’s face it, sleep-inducing. But the perverse disparity in tax rates between the super-rich and the rest of us is enough to grab anyone’s attention.

The very wealthy earn much of their income through dividends and capital gains, which are taxed at 15 percent. This low rate would apply specifically to a wildly successful hedge-fund manager who made, say, $50 million last year. By contrast, an insurance company executive who made $500,000 — just 1 percent of what the hedge-fund manager took home — would pay a top marginal income tax rate of 35 percent. Even a teacher who made just $50,000 — 0.1 percent of the hedge-fund haul — would pay a top marginal rate of 25 percent.

Obama proposes tax legislation that would erase this disparity. He also vows that, unless Congress enacts comprehensive — and fair — tax reform, he will allow the Bush tax cuts for households earning more than $250,000 a year to expire at the end of 2012.

The overall plan that Obama announced Monday would cut deficits by about $4 trillion over the next 10 years — without gutting programs that bolster the middle class and aid the poor. New tax revenue and money saved from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan make up most of the total.

Obama’s proposed savings in Medicare and Medicaid are modest and tailored so that their impact is progressive. The president correctly decided that ensuring Social Security’s long-term solvency should proceed on a separate track. All this should be heartening to those who really want to preserve these vital programs.

The headline from Obama’s plan, though, is the call for wealthy Americans to pay taxes like everybody else. If Republicans believe the current system is fine, Obama said, “they should be called out. They should have to defend that unfairness. . . . They ought to have to answer for it.”

We’ve already heard their answer.

And we’ve heard Obama’s retort: “This is not class warfare. It’s math.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-tax-plan-is-common-sense-not-class-warfare/2011/09/19/gIQA5N2sfK_story.html

Posted 1 year ago #
rikker

senior member
Joined: Jan '11
Posts: 7,264

Has Obama EVER vetoed ANYTHING? It seems that any spineless compromise that comes to his desk gets approved.

Posted 1 year ago #
Checker

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Joined: Apr '11
Posts: 6,267

And we’ve heard Obama’s retort: “This is not class warfare. It’s math.”

That's exactly what it is......MATH!

Posted 1 year ago #
IAmWinner

hardcore member
Joined: Jan '11
Posts: 2,059

Nobama, it is time for you to resign!!!!!!

Posted 1 year ago #
Black Lion

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Posts: 16,847

Rikker, he may have to in order to show the GOP that he has a set...

Posted 1 year ago #
Beach Baby

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Joined: Dec '10
Posts: 8,670

I agree BL. All these back room deals and compromise just lead those Obama supporters to worry that he does not believe what he says - or the balls to back it up.

I think he does believe what he says - but he is trying to save the country the extra angst of more divisive politics in Washington. But, we want to see someone stand up and fight against the status quo and manipulations of other politicians.

Posted 1 year ago #
ROTFL

core member
Joined: Jun '11
Posts: 839

Obama threw down the same crap he threw in front of a the democrat controlled senate and house over a year ago. Pelosi and Reid did NOT bother with it.

Now, Obama throws it down in front of Reid who is AGAIN ignoring it as is new Speaker of the House.

There are taxes in Obama bill that SLAMS everyone including a big one on when someone buys a house or a plane ticket.

AND TAXES DO NOT ADDRESS THE JOBS ISSUE (other than the fact it makes it harder for businesses to hire people when they have to pay taxes instead)

Posted 1 year ago #
rikker

senior member
Joined: Jan '11
Posts: 7,264

"Rikker, he may have to in order to show the GOP that he has a set..."

Well, if he vetoes something substantial and clings to the principles that got him elected, I'll be amazed.

Posted 1 year ago #
Obot 50549535

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ROTFL says that taxes "makes it harder for businesses to hire people when they have to pay taxes instead".

Which is such BS I don't know where to start. Since money spent on payroll is not taxed, taxes have no effect on money available to hire people. I have no idea how you could justify this statement.

Posted 1 year ago #
ROTFL

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Joined: Jun '11
Posts: 839

Obot

ROTFL says that taxes "makes it harder for businesses to hire people when they have to pay taxes instead".

__________

Once AGAIN, IGNORE what the MAIN POINT of what I posted was and create a Saul Alinsky diversion to a secondary point about taxes.

IGNORE the MAIN POINT ...............which is this Obama bill is a REHASH of what he already sent to Reid and Pelosi when they owned both houses and THEY IGNORED IT. And, Reid is IGNORING IT NOW as well as the new Speaker of the House Boehner.

.

Posted 1 year ago #
Obot 50549535

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Posts: 5,392

ROTFL -- you posted BS, I pointed it out. Don't really see anything wrong with that.

Posted 1 year ago #
Checker

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Joined: Apr '11
Posts: 6,267

The reference of 'Saul Alinsky' used in any conversation is the dead giveaway to the IGNORANCE of the person using it. That is just one of many Fox Newsisms that has become synonymous with misinformation and lack of real understanding of the issues.

Posted 1 year ago #
Obot 50549535

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Joined: Jan '11
Posts: 5,392

An earlier comment by ROTFL also alleges that the jobs bill has a "big tax" on buying a house. Any known facts behind this?

Posted 1 year ago #
Bumpy

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Joined: Dec '10
Posts: 2,743

An earlier comment by ROTFL also alleges that the jobs bill has a "big tax" on buying a house. Any known facts behind this?

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Posted 1 year ago #
Checker

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Joined: Apr '11
Posts: 6,267

Bumpy,

LOL!

Posted 1 year ago #