If you had the stomach to listen to Obama’s latest debacle of a speech, you would have heard the usual – class warfare, compassion, inherited from Bush, tax increases, fair share yada, yada, yada – yawn (Joe Biden even fell asleep).  The same typical progressive b.s. that Obama spews during any of his speeches only his new buzz word is ‘Winning The Future’.  Of course, most  Americans know that we won’t be winning the future until 2012 when Obama is voted out of office.  It’s really simple – Obama came up with a 2012 budget that increased the deficit by over $1 trillion alone.  There were no serious considerations of budget cuts or entitlement reforms.  There were no serious reforms of any kind even thought we are on the tipping edge of disaster when it comes to spending and outrageous debt and deficit.Chairman of the House Budget Committee Paul Ryan delivered a plan that will decrease the deficit by $6 trillion over the next 10 years.  While the plan may not be perfect, at least he actually came up with a plan that delves into the real issues causing some of the huge and unsustainable spending in this country.  Obama figured he’d have to pretend to actually care about our unsustainable spending so came out (sort of) with some his own ‘progressive’ ideas on how to cut the federal budget. Of course Obama uses the word ‘scalpel’ which as most know is a tiny instrument to make tiny incisions.  What this country needs, in the words of Republican Tom Coburn, is a ‘chainsaw’ to attack the budget.

Ryan’s response is below in full:

Paul Ryan Responds to President’s Disappointing, Partisan Speech

WASHINGTON – House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan made the following statement after attending the President’s speech on deficit reduction:

“When the President reached out to ask us to attend his speech, we were expecting an olive branch. Instead, his speech was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our fiscal crisis. What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander-in-chief; we heard a political broadside from our campaigner-in-chief.

“Last year, in the absence of a serious budget, the President created a Fiscal Commission. He then ignored its recommendations and omitted any of its major proposals from his budget, and now he wants to delegate leadership to yet another commission to solve a problem he refuses to confront.

“We need leadership, not a doubling down on the politics of the past.  By failing to seriously confront the most predictable economic crisis in our history, this President’s policies are committing our children to a diminished future. We are looking for bipartisan solutions, not partisan rhetoric. When the President is ready to get serious about confronting this challenge, we’ll be here.”

Key Facts About the President’s Speech

General:

• Counts unspecified savings over 12 years, not the 10-year window by which serious budget proposals are evaluated.
• Postpones all savings until 2013 – after his reelection campaign.
• Runs away from the Fiscal Commission’s recommendations on Social Security – puts forward no specific ideas or even a process to force action.
• Calls for the appointment of another commission, after mostly omitting from his Fiscal Year 2012 Budget any of proposals submitted by the commission he appointed last year.
• Non-specific framework fails to meet his Fiscal Commission’s own deficit-reduction goals.

Taxes:

• Proposes to raise taxes on the American people by more than $1 trillion, devastating our fragile economy and stifling job creation.
• Endorsed the Fiscal Commission’s ideas on taxes, which specifically called for lower tax rates and a broader base, but then called for higher tax rates. Which is it?
• Government health and retirement programs are growing at more than twice the speed of the economy. At the current rate of spending, revenue would have to rise “by more than 50 percent” just to keep debt at its current level, according to the Government Accountability Office. That means tax increases across-the-board, now and in the future.  

Medicare:

• Instead of proposing structural reforms that would actually reduce health care costs, the President proposed across-the-board cuts to current seniors’ care.
• Strictly limits the amount of health care seniors can receive within the existing structure of unsustainable government health care programs.
• Gives more power to unelected bureaucrats in Washington to determine what treatments seniors should or shouldn’t get, against a backdrop of costs that continue to rise.
• Conceded that the relentlessly rising cost of health care is the primary reason why the nation is threatened by debt, and implicitly conceded that his health care law failed to solve the problem.
• Eviscerates the only competitive element anywhere in health-care entitlement programs – the competition amongst Part D prescription-drug plans – which allowed the drug benefit to come in 41 percent under budget.

Medicaid:

• Acknowledges that the open-ended financing of Medicaid is a crippling financial burden to both states and the federal government, but explicitly rejected the only solution to this problem, which is to give states the freedom they need to design systems that work for the unique needs of their own populations.

Defense:

• Proposes more cuts on top of $78 billion in cuts included in his own defense budget, which he proposed just two months ago – all at a time when he continues to task the military with new missions.
• Secretary Gates has said that the military needs 2 percent – 3 percent real growth just to keep executing the missions that DOD has already been assigned.
• Secretary Gates described deficit reduction plans that let budget targets drive defense policy as “math, not strategy.”

Since it has become pretty clear that Obama knows absolutely nothing about the economy other than how to make it worse for the middle class and Americans in general, it’s pretty easy to see who will be ‘winning the future’ and it certainly isn’t the Democrats.  They’ve had since 2007 to actually prove they are useful but have done everything to prove they are not.  When they controlled both the Legislative and Executive branches over the past 3 years, they did absolutely nothing but increase the deficit and make our economy worse.  For any American to believe that Obama and the Democrats will do an ‘about face’ now and actually do anything to ease the spending in this country is complete and utter lunacy.

Note to Obama and pals like Paul Krugman:  FDR’s spending policies turned the Depression into the GREAT Depression.