The White House stance on reducing the deficit, laid out in the president\u2019s speech at George Washington University last week, was clueless \u2013 clueless and dangerous.<\/p>\n
Starting moments after Mr. Obama stepped down from the podium, political commentators have been giving the address a thumbs down. \u00a0\u00a0Everyone has seen the media comments about the talk\u2019s excessive partisanship and lack of any serious thinking on how to deal with the crisis. As is his custom, the president spoke in general terms as if he were a committed debt reducer. \u00a0But when he got down to specifics, his mode was \u201cyes\u2026 but.\u201d The \u201cbuts\u201d all came down to, \u201cwell, yes, we spend a lot, but we have to, so we won\u2019t cut.\u201d \u00a0The only exceptions were defense and taxes.<\/p>\n
This not-giving-an-inch-of-ground approach was coupled with ripping into Congressman Paul Ryan for his deficit-reduction plan, the sole plan on the table for seriously addressing the government\u2019s debt crisis. \u00a0In a particularly graceless move, reminiscent of his dressing down of the Supreme Court with the justices present during the 2010 State of the Union address, the president had invited Congressman Ryan to attend the speech and placed him in the front row.<\/p>\n
The dismayed media reaction was not confined to conservatives. \u00a0Among many frequent media cheerleaders, commentary took on a new tone. \u00a0There was an edge that suggests the president\u2019s support in what until now has been a poodle press may have been in some fundamental way damaged. \u00a0But perhaps the most telling dismissal of the remarks came from an entirely non-political source, the hometown publication for Wall Street wonks called Institutional Investor.<\/em><\/p>\n As II\u2019<\/em>s columnist Steve Rosenbush summed up, \u201cPresident Obama\u2019s speech on deficit reduction largely was ignored by the financial markets. \u00a0Investors found little significance\u201d in it. \u00a0He quoted free-market economist and asset manager John Rutledge saying of the talk, \u201cFor the US, I don\u2019t think we have the political will to fix the problem, which means it will be dealt with by inflating the price level and, effectively, repudiating the real value of government debt.\u201d<\/p>\n That repudiation by inflation may already have begun. \u00a0Yesterday World Bank president Robert Zoellick, speaking about inflating global food prices, warned that the world may be \u201cone shock away\u2026 \u00a0from losing a generation.\u201d \u00a0Fear of the worldwide economic devastation that U.S.-driven accelerating inflation could cause is one reason that China, Brazil, and others have been asking if there is an alternative to the dollar\u2019s preeminence in international trade and finance.<\/p>\n The fact is, the move away from the dollar\u2019s dominance could already be underway. \u00a0The decision will not truly come from governments but from markets. \u00a0More and more global transactions will be conducted in denominations other than dollars. \u00a0Whenever governments and the various official bodies drop the dollar as the global standard, they will only be ratifying a fact that markets have already decreed. \u00a0Our officials will protest, but it will be too late.<\/p>\n Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. \u00a0Already Washington is beginning to look for alternatives to compensate for the lack of leadership from the White House. \u00a0Congressman Ryan is emerging as one answer. \u00a0The Senate\u2019s Gang of Six is another. The think tanks are feeding their own proposals into the mix. \u00a0The Left has sided with the president in effectively denying there is any spending problem, outside of defense and what they call tax expenditures. \u00a0And as a result the Left\u2019s power may be waning among Senate Democrats, their powerbase on Capitol Hill. Senators may not know much about economics and finance, but they do know about votes. \u00a0Last November\u2019s election told the many Red State Democratic senators that they must find a route for accommodation with the budget cutters. \u00a0Those in the Senate class of 2012 who can\u2019t or who refuse to go along may secure another nomination from their party\u2019s leftist base. \u00a0But looking at the recent election, you\u2019d have to say \u2013 and they are undoubtedly saying to themselves — reelection will be out of the question.<\/p>\n So here is where we stand today. \u00a0The president is seen as having effectively announced that he is not a serious player in resolving the great crisis of American government in our age. \u00a0There is, effectively, a search underway for an alternative to this feckless leadership. \u00a0We will see what progress is possible before the 2012 elections, when the American people will decide if checking out is acceptable in the occupant of the highest office in the land. \u00a0But with the situation as dangerous as it is, do we have that much time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The White House stance on reducing the deficit, laid out in the president\u2019s speech at George Washington University last week, was clueless \u2013 clueless and dangerous. Starting moments after Mr. Obama stepped down from the podium, political commentators have been giving the address a thumbs down. \u00a0\u00a0Everyone has seen the media comments about the talk\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-debt-crisis","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=865"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":868,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865\/revisions\/868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}