The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

Author:Barack Obama
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780307382092
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2006-10-16T16:00:00+00:00

INVESTMENTS TO MAKE America more competitive, and a new American social compact—if pursued in concert, these broad concepts point the way to a better future for our children and grandchildren. But there’s one last piece to the puzzle, a lingering question that presents itself in every single policy debate in Washington.

How do we pay for it?

At the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, we had an answer. For the first time in almost thirty years, we enjoyed big budget surpluses and a rapidly declining national debt. In fact, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan expressed concern that the debt might get paid down too fast, thereby limiting the Reserve System’s ability to manage monetary policy. Even after the dot-com bubble burst and the economy was forced to absorb the shock of 9/11, we had the chance to make a down payment on sustained economic growth and broader opportunity for all Americans.

But that’s not the path we chose. Instead, we were told by our President that we could fight two wars, increase our military budget by 74 percent, protect the homeland, spend more on education, initiate a new prescription drug plan for seniors, and initiate successive rounds of massive tax cuts, all at the same time. We were told by our congressional leaders that they could make up for lost revenue by cutting out government waste and fraud, even as the number of pork barrel projects increased by an astonishing 64 percent.

The result of this collective denial is the most precarious budget situation that we’ve seen in years. We now have an annual budget deficit of almost $300 billion, not counting more than $180 billion we borrow every year from the Social Security Trust Fund, all of which adds directly to our national debt. That debt now stands at $9 trillion—approximately $30,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country.

It’s not the debt itself that’s most troubling. Some debt might have been justified if we had spent the money investing in those things that would make us more competitive—overhauling our schools, or increasing the reach of our broadband system, or installing E85 pumps in gas stations across the country. We might have used the surplus to shore up Social Security or restructure our health-care system. Instead, the bulk of the debt is a direct result of the President’s tax cuts, 47.4 percent of which went to the top 5 percent of the income bracket, 36.7 percent of which went to the top 1 percent, and 15 percent of which went to the top one-tenth of 1 percent, typically people making $1.6 million a year or more.

In other words, we ran up the national credit card so that the biggest beneficiaries of the global economy could keep an even bigger share of the take.

So far we’ve been able to get away with this mountain of debt because foreign central banks—particularly China’s—want us to keep buying their exports. But this easy credit won’t continue forever. At some point, foreigners will stop lending us money, interest rates will go up, and we will spend most of our nation’s output paying them back.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.