THE POLITICAL ANIMAL

Now that President Obama has set one milestone by becoming the first African-American to make it to the White House, he aims to set another one – cut down that hideous monster known as The Deficit.

According to Ross Colvin of Reuters, “President Barack Obama wants to slash the ballooning deficit in half by 2013, U.S. officials said on Saturday, after massively increasing public spending to stem the worst economic crisis in decades.”

Obama will elaborate on this goal at a summit on fiscal responsibility that he will be hosting at the White House tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the president has made the ailing economy his number one priority. Tens of thousands of Americans have already lost their jobs and the situation in the marketplace does not appear to be getting better. Obama acknowledges that his performance on the economy will determine whether his presidency will be seen as a success or a failure.

“We can’t generate sustained growth without getting our deficits under control,” Obama said in his weekly radio address. The president also told 95 percent of the country that tax cuts were on their way to help them in their financial troubles.

“An administration official said Obama was proposing to cut the deficit, which private economists project will rise to $1.5 trillion this year, through a mixture of tax increases on wealthier Americans and spending cuts,” Colvin reports.

“The deficit this administration inherited was $1.3 trillion or 9.2 percent of GDP. By 2013, the end of the president’s first term, the budget cuts the deficit to $533 billion or 3.0 percent of GDP,” the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

“Most of the savings will come from winding down the war in Iraq, increased (tax) revenue from those making more than $250,000 a year, and savings from making government work more efficiently and eliminating programs that do not work,” the official said.

Some may see this as an ironic goal for a man who just signed the biggest spending bill in the history of the Milky Way galaxy. This animal thinks Obama’s goal is possible, but not likely to be achieved for various reasons.

For starters, while the improving conditions in Iraq may make it possible for the president to withdraw the main body of troops currently stationed there, the nation-building effort in that country will continue to eat up billions of dollars before it’s finished, if it ever is.

Then there’s the situation in Afghanistan, which just gets worse and worse. If things do not turn around over there in the next few years, Obama will be compelled to pour a massive number of troops and a treasure chest full of tax-payers’ gold into that quagmire.

As for talk of trimming the size of government and eliminating wasteful programs, been there, done that. We hear this all the time, but does anything ever get done about it? Not that I am aware of.  

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