According to Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, a group of six senators, three Democrats and three Republicans, “is considering legislation that would trigger new taxes and budget cuts if Congress fails to meet a set of mandatory spending targets and other fiscal goals aimed at reducing federal deficits.”* The group includes Dick Durbin of Illinois and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
My goodness. People as far apart as Dick Durbin and Tom Coburn are trying to solve our nation’s fiscal problems, and all the President can do is to present a budget which Erskine Bowles, the Democratic co-chair of the President’s own National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, said goes “nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare.”
Alice Rivlin, another member of the Commission, and budget director under President Clinton, said this of the President’s budget: “I would have preferred to see the administration get out front on addressing the entitlements and the tax reform that we need to reduce long-run deficits."
But while he won’t lead in Washington, the President is willing to advise the new Republican governor of Wisconsin on how he should handle Wisconsin’s budget problems:
“President Obama thrust himself and his political operation this week into Wisconsin's broiling budget battle, mobilizing opposition Thursday to a Republican bill that would curb public-worker benefits while planning similar action in other state capitals.
Obama accused Scott Walker, the state's new Republican governor, of unleashing an ‘assault’ on unions in pushing emergency legislation that would nullify collective-bargaining agreements that affect most public employees, including teachers. …
‘Some of what I've heard coming out of Wisconsin, where they're just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally, seems like more of an assault on unions,’ Obama told a Milwaukee television reporter, taking the unusual step of inviting a local station into the White House for a sit-down interview.”
So, while Dick Durbin and Tom Coburn are actually trying to do something to solve our country’s problems in Washington, President Obama has decided to focus his attention on Madison, Wisconsin. That’s audacity, all right, but I am not sure I would call it “the audacity of hope”.
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* Jonathan Weisman, “Deficit Plan Details Emerge,” The Wall Street Journal, February 17, 2011.
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