Obama’s SOTU And Sequester—Just Big Government And Tax Increases

by Don Azarias
March 16, 2013
“Medicare is unsustainable and Social Security also needs reform. You have to have a president who is willing to spend some political capital in this. And I intend to spend some.”—President Barack Obama speaking before The Washington Post’s Editorial Board on Jan. 15, 2009.
What’s this? Another one those telepromptered crap coming out of President Barack Obama’s mouth? You bet it is. Anyone who says otherwise is a bona fide Obama fanatic. Obama always says he’ll do one thing but always ends up doing exactly the opposite. So what’s new?
In his State of the Union address on Feb. 12, 2013, Obama added that he is “prepared” to enact Medicare reforms that would save the same amount of money “by the beginning of the next decade” as changes called for by the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission.
While the Simpson-Bowles is regarded as gold standard of deficit-reduction idea in the nation’s capital, Obama seems to have conveniently forgotten the fact that he had previously disregarded and ignored the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction recommendations. How can we be so sure that he will follow them this time?
And, as one might expect, Republicans dismissed Obama’s State of the Union speech as nothing more than big government spending and more tax increases.
In his GOP response, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), urged Obama to “abandon his obsession with raising taxes” and said the president had shifted the nation away from free-market economic principles that had helped middle-class families achieve prosperity. “Presidents in both parties—from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan—have known that our free-enterprise economy is the source of our middle-class prosperity. But President Obama? He believes it’s the cause of our problems,” Rubio said.
Rubio, a rising star in the Republican Party and a potential 2016 presidential contender, pointed to his Miami roots to address Obama’s frequent portrayal of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney—and his party—as only caring about the wealthiest Americans. Rubio said he still lived in the “same working-class neighborhood I grew up in” and his neighbors “aren’t millionaires” but retirees, workers and immigrants. “His favorite attack of all is that those who don’t agree with him—that we only care about rich people,” Rubio added.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), said Obama offered the American people “little more than more of the same ‘stimulus’ policies that have failed to fix our economy and put Americans back to work. We cannot grow the middle class and foster job creation by growing government and raising taxes.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), in a separate speech, said both parties had failed voters by driving up trillion-dollar deficits. “Washington acts in a way that your family never could—they spend money they do not have, they borrow from future generations, and then they blame each other for never fixing the problem.”
Republicans sought to characterize Obama as overly reliant on government to promote and support his socialist ideologies while being unmindful of the unsustainable debt and deficit that could, ultimately, turn a once financially robust United States in the same category as some member nations of the European Union.
Obama has made it a habit of saying that he wants to save the middle class though he seems ignorant of the fact that the middle class has always carried the tax burden in this country. It has always been the middle class that is being bled dry to pay for those unaffordable social service and other safety net programs being espoused by Obama and the Democrats. When is enough enough? Isn’t it about time that they give the middle class a break? Isn’t it about time that they stop wasteful spending and heed the Republicans’ call for fiscal discipline?
Now comes the “sequester crisis”. It’s really nothing but a fabrication of Obama himself. For the readers’ information, the idea originated in the White House. It’s designed to force the American people to accept even higher taxes and even more government spending. It’s also one of those dirty political schemes that Obama is using in order to “blackball” Republican lawmakers.
Both political parties are blaming each other for the stalemate in averting the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts set to take effect on March 1. But, in reality, this impasse will broadly impact those hard-working American families who belong to the middle class.
Let’s try to make sense of this: This $85 billion in automatic spending cuts represent only about TWO PERCENT of the federal budget. Yes, TWO PERCENT. How, in the world, could it even have an enormous impact on a country whose federal government’s dollar spending is being measured in terms of trillion? Is this really nothing but another one of Obama’s “manufactured” crisis that other people are saying?
As I’ve alluded to earlier, Speaker Boehner and the Republicans want to cut government spending to a more sustainable level. But President Obama and his Democratic allies only want to raise taxes without spending cuts. They refuse to make any concessions to alleviate the nation’s financial crisis. They don’t seem to have any conception of what “fiscal responsibility” is all about. The American people must understand that putting the blame solely on Republicans is most unfair.
Instead of threatening the livelihood of millions of Americans with sequester-triggered work furloughs and layoffs, President Obama and the Democratic Party must end the tax-and-spend policies that continue to cripple the American economy.
Should we, hardworking American taxpayers, allow the Obama Administration to shamelessly perpetuate the dangerous culture of dependency among illegal immigrants and freeloading welfare recipients who expect government handouts and taxpayer-supported benefits as a way of life in the United States? We, hardworking Americans, are being fleeced by an administration that’s hell-bent on creating a blood-sucking federal leviathan to cater to special interest groups while we continue to foot the bill.
In short, our tax dollars are being used to feed and provide health care to those so called “freeloaders.” And that’s exactly the reason why Obama and his Democratic allies don’t want any cuts made to the unsustainable federal government spending. When will it stop? This is simply another outrageous insult to tax-paying Americans who are being used by the Obama administration and the Democratic Party in order to fund their radical agenda and, potentially, to “buy” future votes for future Democratic presidential candidates. Get the picture?
Well, of course, you can’t blame me and my fellow Republicans for what’s going on in this country nowadays. We voted for Mitt Romney.