From a recent letter to a friend:
By the way, I said to my co-workers for the first time since the election that I wished Hillary had won. As you know, I went to the inaugural address, and I was as excited like many to see America elect a bright man and an African-American man. People had a lot of hope that America had turned a significant and necessary page that day.
I'm willing to trust the various economists out there who said the current recession required a sizable Keynsian injection of "G" in order to turn things to the good, and, importantly, to keep things from spiraling into something really bad. "Ok, so do that, President Obama," is what I thought. Pass a large stimulus. Don't make the mistake, according to experts on the subject, that both Europe and the U.S. made in the early 30s when they let several very large banks fail, which only accelerated and worsened things. "Ok, so, keep the banks which you believe cannot fail from failing, President Obama, which possibly also includes AIG", I thought.
But, except for those extraordinary, one-off payments, bring the structural budget into balance, the usual federal budget everyone on Capitol Hill and all of us are so familiar with. As much as I don't like "off-budget" accounting, I would have argued for keeping the Stimulus and rescue payments off-budget, so that then the President's budget would show clearly (and only) what kind of fiscal, budgetary plan the President is proposing. And Congressmen and all of us could then easily judge whether his budget plan is in keeping with his campaign promise to balance the budget, and lead us back to annual surpluses, so that we can begin to repay the balance on our debt.
This was something President Clinton did and was rightly proud for. When Hillary spoke on this issue, I believed her when she said she would return to the same fiscal approach. She had credibility. She had a record reflected and inherited from her husband. And I believed her. That might not have been "change". It might indeed have been "back to the future". But history offers successes and failures. And rational behavior repeats successes and learns from failure. I wanted to repeat that particular success.
But Obama campaigned almost identically to her on that issue. And when it became obvious that he would be the nominee, I believed him more on that subject than John McCain. McCain is not only a Republican - a party which confers on its members a phenomenal guilt by association on the matter of deficit spending in the wake of its most recent three presidents, Reagan, George H.W Bush, and George W. Bush - but he dedicated the majority of his stump time on the subject of fiscal discipline railing against earmarks, which are 1% of the budget. The great Republican deficits were being generated by the other 99%, and I wanted to know how his Republican presidency would be different. I heard his stump speech nearly every day on the radio. Like Obama's, it was nearly always the same. And on budgets, besides eschewing earmarks, he would simply declare, "I will balance the budget, my friends. I will balance the budget." He never told me how, what he would do differently. In fact, he more often told me what he would do the same, such as make the Bush tax cuts permanent. He chanted that, too. But, as soon as you do that, your numbers, like Bush's, don't add up, unless McCain was going to tell me all the programs he was going cut out which Bush never did, or the agency budgets he was going to slash, and by how much. The numbers were never there. So, since Obama was at least parroting Hillary, I believed him.
But now after having seen his budget, the CBO projects annual deficits throughout the Obama presidency and beyond (yes, he is planning to leave his successor a sizable deficit, making his complaints about what Bush left him ring distinctly hollow these days). That budget, and that fact, leave me feeling sad, sad for our country, and a bit tricked. I still could not have voted for McCain, but now I find myself wanting Hillary more than ever. It's not to be, though. But she is there, a voice in his cabinet. A significant voice, with a lot of access to the President. His presidency is young. And next year offers the opportunity again to turn the budget in a different, more responsible direction. I have to hope that happens, maybe, that Hillary and others work on him, make clear to him that his legacy will indeed be a fiscal one, not a military one, and that the greatest threat to that legacy will be the red flag which is the red ink he hands over to the next president. So, I have hope, but, right now, given the budget he has proposed, that's all I have for the time being.
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