SmashMouth

President Obama pinned the blame on Republicans Tuesday for looming spending cuts that may be triggered by what was originally a White House proposal -- while a former leader of the president's deficit commission said it's Obama who's on the path to a "failed presidency" if he can't tackle the debt.
The president spoke Tuesday at the White House, urging Congress to come up with a short-term fix to cancel sweeping cuts to defense and other programs set to hit March 1.
"These cuts are not smart. They are not fair. They will hurt our economy. They will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls," Obama said. "This is not an abstraction -- people will lose their jobs."



The president ticked off a host of expected repercussions should the $85 billion in cuts for this year take effect. He said Border Patrol, emergency responders, FBI agents, airport controllers and others would all face cutbacks. He said teachers would be laid off by the thousands and America's military would be degraded.
As he has before, Obama urged Congress to pass a stopgap to allow for more time to pass a bigger package. But, with Congress out this week and many lawmakers resisting another attempt to kick the can on the cuts, Obama tried to cast Republicans as the ones responsible.
Obama suggested their resistance to his calls to pass a "balanced" package -- by closing tax loopholes for top earners and big corporations -- is the hold-up. He asked whether Republicans are willing to let hundreds of thousands of people lose their jobs "just to protect a few special-interest tax loopholes."
He blamed the current stalemate on "partisan recklessness and ideological rigidity."
House Speaker John Boehner, after Obama talked, claimed Obama was merely reinforcing what Republicans have been saying -- "his sequester is the wrong way to cut spending." Boehner and others note the so-called sequester -- which set up more than $1 trillion in sweeping spending cuts if Congress failed, as it did, to reach a compromise on deficit reduction -- originated in the White House.
"But once again, the president offered no credible plan that can pass Congress -- only more calls for higher taxes," Boehner said.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney acknowledged that the idea was originally "put forward" by the White House. But he said the White House only pitched it as an "absolute necessity" in 2011 to avoid default over the debt ceiling, and noted Republicans "embraced" it at the time.
Shortly before he spoke, Obama was also dealt a blunt warning by former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson, who co-chaired the president's deficit-reduction commission.
Simpson warned that Obama "will have a failed presidency" unless he deals "honestly" with entitlements, saying programs like Medicare and Social Security must be dealt with in order to get the country on a sustainable path.
"If he wants to leave it alone and not deal with those two biggies, forget the rest of the stuff -- he'll have a failed presidency," Simpson told Fox News.
While Obama says opposition to tax hikes is holding up a deal, Republicans say Democrats' resistance to major changes to entitlements are a big part of the problem.
Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the former co-chairmen of the president's deficit-reduction commission who for years have been urging Washington to stop kicking the can, got in front of the president early Tuesday morning to push a plan of their own.
"Over the medium and long-term, our debt is projected to continue growing faster than the economy. It is simply on an unsustainable path," they said in a statement.
The two fiscal hawks pitched a plan to avert the looming spending cuts -- heavy cuts to defense and other programs that they describe as "abrupt" and "mindless" -- and instead enact a $2.4 trillion deficit reduction plan over 10 years.
A quarter would come from changes to health care spending, a quarter would come from closing tax loopholes and the rest would come from spending reductions including a stingier adjustment of Social Security's cost of living increases.
On tax reform, the plan presents a middle ground -- by using the savings from closing loopholes to both lower rates and bring down the deficit. By contrast, Obama has pushed to use that savings mostly to reduce the deficit, while Republicans have pushed to use it to bring down rates.
Simpson and Bowles cast their plan as building on the proposal from the president's deficit commission -- a plan that Congress never adopted and Obama never fully endorsed.
Obama, fresh off a three-day Florida golfing trip, pressed his own case during the event at the White House Tuesday morning. Emergency responders, a group of workers the White House says could be affected if state and local governments lose federal money as a result of the cuts, joined him.
The $85 billion in cuts, known as the sequester, will start taking effect on March 1 unless Congress acts. The White House says the sequester could derail an economy still suffering from high unemployment and sluggish growth.
Obama wants to offset the sequester through a combination of targeted spending cuts and increased tax revenue. The White House is backing a proposal unveiled last week by Senate Democrats that is in line with the president's principles.
But that plan was met with an icy reception by Republicans, who oppose raising more tax revenue in order to offset the cuts. GOP leaders say the president got the tax increases he wanted at the beginning of the year when Congress agreed to raise taxes on family income exceeding $450,000 a year.
A senior administration official later insisted the White House is not looking to raise tax rates for top earners, but does want to close deductions.
The official indicated the White House expects Republicans to eventually allow this despite statements to the contrary. Still, the White House sees the March 1 cuts as a real possibility, warning that the economic impact will be ugly.
The Democrats propose to generate revenue by plugging some tax loopholes. Those include tax breaks for the oil and natural gas industry and businesses that have sent jobs overseas, and by taxing millionaires at a rate of at least 30 percent.
Some Republicans, including House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., have advocated plugging loopholes, but as part of a discussion on a tax overhaul, not sequestration.
"Loopholes are necessary for tax reform," Ryan said Sunday on ABC's "This Week." `'If you take them for spending, you're blocking tax reform and you're really not getting the deficit under control."
The sequester was first set to begin taking effect on Jan. 1. But as part of the "fiscal cliff" negotiations, the White House and lawmakers agreed to push it off for two months in order to create space to work on a larger budget deal.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.


Read more: Obama pins blame on Republicans for looming cuts, as fiscal hawk warns of 'failed presidency' | Fox News

saintfan

Of course he blames the GOP. He'd blame Jesus if he could. He sure as hell isn't going to own any of it. I loathe that man.

Danno

He's not much of a leader. The only thing more pathetic than Obama are the fools that enable him.

dam1953

Well as out illustrious Sec of State said so eloquently, "In America, you have a right to be stupid."

SmashMouth

Romney on sequester showdown: Obama 'berating Republicans' | Fox News Video

lee909

From the outside looking in,you all look as bad as each other politically.
Nobody is willing to work with each other out of principle and the only people that will suffer are the working classes.The rich will stay rich as they always do.Politicians care about one thing.How big a slice of the pie they can cut up for themselves are the moneyed that put them there,and how few of the crumbs they can leave you all to fight over.

Danno

Chock full of wrong Lee.

lee909

In what way?
That politicians don't care about you?
That nobody is willing to work together?

As I say,I don't live over there and that's what it looks like from this side if the water.

Danno

If you're willing to listen and learn, I'll explain it to you. Unfortunately 99% of the time it gets ignored.

First off... the "rich" isn't the same every year. People move in and out of this category constantly. The freedoms we have here allow this to happen. Wealth envy targets jealousy, which the Democrats do constantly.

This is the land of opportunity that allows anyone the freedom to succeed beyond their wildest imagination if they work hard enough.

Demonizing the "rich" is basically an attack on those freedoms we have here. The ignorant in this nation applaud this attack and Democrats seize the opportunity to gain more and more power to rule over American lives. It's elitism at its worst.

When I hear anyone demonize the "rich" I automatically assume they're ignorant and will likely stay that way based on the 1,000's of conversations with wealth envy democrats I've had over the years.

So if you're able to accept the fact that "rich" isn't derogatory, then we can address the other wrongs you posted. If you can't, then I'm simply wasting my time.

Beastmode

Saw a chart today that looked downright evil. The income ratios use reflect a somewhat of a wheel chair ramp with a large spike at the end. Nothing wrong with that, in fact, that's how it should look. You work hard, build something, invent something and you reap the benefits. Today however it looks like a flatline with an Eiffel Tower at the end.

There is something very wrong with that picture and it's not just the rich. It's a system failure on almost every level. If you don't believe that then here is some news for you:

In an article in the January 17, 2008 New York Times, George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen described "predatory borrowing" as potentially a larger problem than predatory lending:

"As much as 70 percent of recent early payment defaults had fraudulent misrepresentations on their original loan applications, according to one recent study. The research was done by BasePoint Analytics, which helps banks and lenders identify fraudulent transactions; the study looked at more than three million loans from 1997 to 2006, with a majority from 2005 to 2006. Applications with misrepresentations were also five times as likely to go into default. Many of the frauds were simple rather than ingenious. In some cases, borrowers who were asked to state their incomes just lied, sometimes reporting five times actual income; other borrowers falsified income documents by using computers."

It should be noted that mortgage applications are usually completed by mortgage brokers, rather than by borrowers themselves, making it difficult to pin down the source of any misrepresentations. The only situation in which the application would not be done by the broker, but rather the borrower, would be in a "stated income loan."

Nobody wants to talk about this fact. Homebuyers need to be in jail just as much as anyone else. It's like the poor were attacking the rich and the rich took it out on the middle class.