Another thing that has irritated me: Yes, the debt under Obama has gone up. It sucks but it's a fact of life. At the same time, think of it like this: Gas prices are controlled by the suppliers, not the buyers. Unemployment is dictated by the market-need for jobs, not by what a person says should happen. And the government is leaching money in so many ways, it's a tough sell to blame it all on one person. Especially one who doesn't dictate monetary policy.
Remember back in 2008 when the entire economy was crumbling and every financial expert and economist was saying, "hey this is probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better," leading up to the vote on the TARP act? Go back even further and try and remember when every financial institution was scamming money off everyone's mortgage and reinvesting it for their own personal gains. Remember that? Back to TARP - remember when congress voted to approve to the bank bailout, but said that we didn't need to follow where the money went, and then coincidentally the people who head the companies we were pissed at got huge bonuses for running the economy into the ground?
The fact of the matter, and this is really the point I wanted to get at by writing this, is that the President has very little control over economic policy. Yes there are some abilities he has, like vetoing spending plans put forth by Congress, but by rights given under Article 1, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution, "All bills for rasing revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other bills."
In layman's terms - Congress controls the money. All this angst toward the president, not just Obama but any residing or former president, is greatly misdirected. And for the vast majority of 12 years our congressional leaders haven't been working together on solving anything. Most, if not all, of the heavy hitters that are in office currently are simply there because they are career politicians.
Warren Buffett, billionaire investor extraordinaire, has become a champion. of how to fix the debt problem. In 2011 Buffett said that he, and a number of his billionaire friends, didn't agree with the fact that the wealthy in this country were paying less in federal taxes than the middle class. This lead to the Buffett Rule being proposed by the Obama administration and shot down by Congress.
Now he's come up with an even better idea: a how-to method to right the ship as far as the national debt is concerned. In an interview with CNBC he said:
The fact of the matter is upon its original conception, Congress was not comprised of congressmen and women. It was made up of representatives who had jobs to go back to when Congress went into recess. They didn't make money for working in Congress. This is what forced quick decision-making on real issues. Would that happen today? Not likely. Now we have people who are in office who are too afraid to address one of the most important money-wasting ventures we're in (hint hint: the blank check given to the pentagon for defense spending) because it would be "unpatriotic" to do so.
The patriotic thing to do is to address the issues at hand that are bankrupting and plaguing the country, working across party lines, and eliminating real threats to American democracy.
Simply, friends, the more important matter of this upcoming election is not which presidential candidate you're going to vote for. The real issue we need to pay attention to is who we should vote in and out of office in Congress. It gets neglected every election cycle and it really needs to be paid more attention to.
Before November rolls around, figure out the right person for the job. Again - right person for the job. That doesn't mean the one you agree with the most. Vote for the person who has the balls to go against their party and actually help the country.
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