Tuesday 15 January 2013

Budget fight - round 2

The US treasury is taking in $100 billion dollars less every month than it spends and the national debt is pushing $16 trillion dollars. Yet President Obama has identified the main enemy of the American people: too little spending!

In his press conference he used the usual strong language that comes natural to him when he backed himself into a corner . Forget compromise and talk about consensus! He told Congress that if they don't raise the debt ceiling by end of February, nurses and firefighters will go unpaid.

What he didn't say is that he could have ensured that it is not nurses and firefighters but the bureaucrats in Washington who go unpaid. Yet this is a president who loves to spend money. More than $900 billion dollars went on bailing out car makers that are now producing too many cars for a vastly shrunken world market. The (second) stimulus which his government pushed through Congress in 2008 did not even make a blip in the unemployment figures for more than three years, yet wiped the triple A rating off the US treasury.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised about all this. Apart from his rhetorical skills, Obama had little to offer in the way of executive experience. And he appointed Timothy Geithner to the position of Secretary of State in the Treasury.

Sadly, in the end, the US taxpayer will have to foot the bill for a president who has shown little hesitation to spend money he does not have. As the fate of Gordon Brown has demonstrated, history wont be too kind with politicians who like spending other people's money.

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