[Swiftwater Gazette] bipartisan reading

[Ed Kroposki]

Here is some bipartisan reading:

What Karl Rove got wrong on the U.S. deficit

By David Axelrod

Friday, January 15, 2010 

 

For its Topic A feature last Sunday, The Post invited a panel of political 

operatives to offer their advice to the Democratic Party on strategy for 

2010 [Sunday Opinion, Jan. 10]. Improbably, one of the operatives 

asked was Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's longtime chief strategist. 

 

This Story

What Rove got wrong on the debt - Democratic strategies for 2010

Rove has some impressive campaign victories to his credit. But given 

the shape in which the last administration left this country, I'm not 

sure I would solicit his advice. And given the backhanded advice he 

offered, I'm not sure he was all that eager to help. 

 

Of all the claims Rove made, one in particular caught my eye for its 

sheer audacity and shamelessness -- that congressional Democrats 

"will run up more debt by October than Bush did in eight years." 

 

So, let's review a little history: 

 

The day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton 

in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus -- with a projected 

10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. When the Bush administration left office, 

it handed President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit -- and projected shortfalls 

of $8 trillion for the next decade. During eight years in office, the Bush 

administration passed two major tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest Americans, 

enacted a costly Medicare prescription-drug benefit and waged two wars, 

without paying for any of it. 

 

To put the breathtaking scope of this irresponsibility in perspective, the Bush 

administration's swing from surpluses to deficits added more debt in its eight 

years than all the previous administrations in the history of our republic 

combined. And its spending spree is the unwelcome gift that keeps on giving: 

Going forward, these unpaid-for policies will continue to add trillions to our deficit. 

 

This fiscal irresponsibility -- and a laissez-faire attitude toward the excesses of the

financial industry -- helped create the conditions for the deepest economic 

catastrophe since the Great Depression. Economists across the political spectrum 

agreed that to deal with this crisis and avoid a second Great Depression, the 

government had to make significant investments to keep our economy going 

and shore up our financial system. 

 

 

That is why President Obama and Congress crafted the American Recovery and 

Reinvestment Act. Despite Rove's assertion, it is widely accepted that the difficult 

but necessary steps Obama took have helped save our economy from an even 

deeper disaster. And while Rove conveniently ignores that it was President Bush - 

not Obama -- who signed into law the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program 

bailout for banks, the Obama administration's rigorous stewardship added 

transparency and accountability that have cut the expected cost of that program 

by two-thirds. 

 

At the same time, we also recognize that we need to address the long legacy of 

overspending in Washington. That is why, shortly after taking office, Obama 

instructed his agency heads to go through the budget page by page, line by line, to 

eliminate what we don't need to help pay for what we do. 

 

As a start, the president proposed billions of dollars in cuts, and he'll continue to 

fight for them and others in the upcoming budget. An analysis by the Washington 

Times concluded that in this first year, Obama had been more successful in getting 

his proposed cuts through Congress than his predecessor was in any of his eight 

years in office. 

 

And even as Obama has pursued landmark health insurance reforms that will hold 

the insurance industry accountable and expand coverage to working Americans, he 

has insisted from the beginning that any reform legislation must not add to the 

federal deficit and must help reduce it over time. According to the nonpartisan 

Congressional Budget Office, the legislation making its way through Congress 

upholds this principle. As the president has said, the federal budget is like an 

ocean liner, not a motor boat, and it will take time to redirect its course. But 

the course correction that was so badly needed after the previous administration 

has begun in earnest. 

 

There's an old saying that everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his 

own facts. The next time Karl Rove would like to offer us some advice, I'd urge 

him to take that to heart. 

 

The writer is a senior adviser to President Barack Obama. 

 

 

 

 

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.theswiftwatergazette.com/pipermail/swiftwatergazette/attachments/20100116/9b5e18c4/attachment-0001.html