Pre-Grading Obama’s Speech
Politico.com has posted excerpts of President Obama’s speech. Based on the selected excerpts, President Obama’s speech deserves a C- at best. Here’s the excerpt that’s worthy of the lowest grade:
We have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.
Well that day of reckoning has arrived, and the time to take charge of our future is here.
Now is the time to act boldly and wisely, to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity. Now is the time to jumpstart job creation, re-start lending, and invest in areas like energy, health care, and education that will grow our economy, even as we make hard choices to bring our deficit down. That is what my economic agenda is designed to do, and that’s what I’d like to talk to you about tonight.
The first, totally obvious question is where will President Obama get the cash that he’ll need to accomplish these things. We’re already facing deficits in excess of $1,000,000,000,000 for both FY 2009 and FY 2010.
The next question I’d ask President Obama is what “regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit.” I’d especially like that answered since one of Sen. Obama’s first actions in the Senate was to join Christopher Dodd in threatening to filibuster a bill meant to reform Fannie and Freddie. Specificially, is President Obama now criticizing the actions of Sen. Obama and Sen. Dodd for preventing the proper regulation of those mortgage brokers?
It’s gratuitous, possibly even pretentious, for President Obama to say that “people bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway” after announcing a $75,000,000,000 bailiout of the people who “bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford.” It’s gratuitous for him to talk about banks who pushed bad loans after his treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, announced the incomplete plans for TARP II.
If President Obama wants to be taken seriously, he can’t criticize behavior that he’s subsidizing with one of his mega-billion dollar bailout packages.
Taxpayers should get infuriated reading this paragraph:
Yesterday, I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office. My administration has also begun to go line by line through the federal budget in order to eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs. As you can imagine, this is a process that will take some time. But we’re starting with the biggest lines. We have already identified two trillion dollars in savings over the next decade.
After signing legislation that wastes hundreds of billions of dollars that are little more than payoffs for his and the Democratic Party’s political allies, President Obama shouldn’t be taken seriously on fiscal restraint. Considering the trillions of dollars that Congress will spend or has spent on bailouts, all of which have caused financial institutions to panic, President Obama’s priorities haven’t been in order thus far.
While I admit that there’s time to straighten those priorities out, it’s difficult to see how the things that he’s set in motion won’t cause economic distress for the next 12 to 18 months.
President Bush wasn’t the picture of fiscal restraint. Thus far, though, President Bush looks like a Tom Coburn or Jim DeMint fiscal hawk by comparison to President Obama.
I’m sure that President Obama’s speech will be well-delivered and that he’ll get high marks on presentation. Unfortunately, we’ve reached a crossroads, one where we need competence and credibility, not polished presentations.
Based on the strawman arguments that are becoming tradition in his speeches and the fact that President Obama’s talk of fiscal restraint is fiction, I’d give this speech a D.
Technorati Tags: Speeches, President Obama, Bailouts, TARP II, Mortgage Bailout, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Political Payoffs, Tim Geithner, Regulations, Christopher Dodd, Filibuster,Economy, Democrats, Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, Fiscal Restraint, Republicans
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog