In March 2006, Sen. Barack Obama said the following in a speech regarding the debt limit. Later these remarks came back to haunt him as he sought to raise the debt limit as President. The flap was not over what he said but rather his vote to not raise the limit. The first response from the White House was it didn’t matter because the measure was going to pass anyway. The next response was his vote was a mistake.
Mistake or not, his vote is not the issue. To me what is most important are the words he said. Those are good words and accurate statements. Words he has totally ignored for the last four years the result of which is shown in the recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) blog post below. I only wish he had thought more about our children and grandchildren as President.
“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” he said. “It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies.
… Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”
CBO Blog Post
The federal government’s fiscal year 2012 has come to a close, and CBO estimates—in its latest Monthly Budget Review—that the federal budget deficit for the year was about $1.1 trillion, or 7.0 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Although the deficit is approximately $200 billion lower than the shortfall recorded in 2011, fiscal year 2012 marks the fourth year in a row with a deficit of more than $1 trillion.
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