Daily Archives: 5 February 2013

Some Remarks on Budget Negotiations

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Can the Progressives in this Congress and White House really be this…lacking in understanding?

The White House had suggested GOP willingness to let sweeping defense cuts take effect was the culprit [for the fourth quarter economic contraction just reported].

However, House Speaker John Boehner (R, OH) spokesman Brendan Buck had this:

These arbitrary, automatic cuts were a creation and demand of the White House in 2011.  Twice the House has passed legislation to replace them with common sense cuts and reforms.  If there was any uncertainty late last year about the sequester, it was because the Democratic-controlled Senate, per usual, never lifted a finger to pass a plan to replace it.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) chimed in:

…today’s disappointing GDP report [of fourth quarter 2012 contraction] is a direct result of the economic uncertainty created by House Republicans’ strategy of obstruction and manufactured crises.

An exploding deficit, a destructive debt, stagnant and too-high unemployment, and a failed recovery from the Panic of 2008 aren’t crises at all—these are normal.  Congressman Sam Graves (R, MO), Chairman of the House Small Business Committee, noted

Is this stunt in economic growth really a surprise?  Anti-growth policies and an anti-business White House produce just that—a lack of growth[.]

Congressman Kevin Brady (R, TX), incoming Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee added

The bottom line is that America’s economy continues to struggle primarily due to President Obama’s penchant for political brinkmanship and the pervasive uncertainty caused by his focus on higher taxes, regulation and ObamaCare.

Unfortunately, yes.  And that’s to the severe detriment of our country.

When Even Europe Notices

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Gregor Peter Schmitz notes in an introductory paragraph in his recent Spiegel International Online article

Global politics have come to a standstill in recent years, with the United States unwilling to show leadership….

He repeated this theme near the end of his article:

You would think it were high time for Obama to jump back into the saddle [referring to restoring American global leadership] before he gets reduced to a lame-duck status.  But no matter how many blinding smiles the notoriously perky Biden flashes in Berlin and Munich, this is probably too much to expect.

In emphasizing this American withdrawal, Schmitz noted a couple of things:

In 1998, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called America the “indispensable nation.”  But now, 15 years later, it is primarily an exhausted one, a global power in decline that has its gaze turned toward the domestic front…

which he said matter-of-factly, as an established truth.  And

[W]hen Obama recently gave his second inaugural address, he avoided making any reference to John F Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural speech, in which he said that America would “pay any price, bear any burden…in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty” around the globe.  Instead, the key sentence of Obama’s speech was: “A decade of war is now ending.”

It’s especially telling that the continent that for so long decried America the “global policeman” and American “arrogance” now is noticing the pell-mell retreat from the world that the Obama administration is effecting.