President Obama submitted a $3.72 trillion budget for FY 2010 with an estimated deficit of $1.555 trillion. After running up a $1.412 trillion deficit in FY 2009 and suffering over four million lost jobs, he claims his focus is on jobs, jobs, jobs and deficit reduction. But his focus targets “green” and union jobs (7% of private sector) rather than nationwide jobs as a whole. Claiming to have created and saved over a million jobs, he actually saved several hundred thousand government jobs. Now government jobs exceed private sector goods producing jobs.
His minuscule deficit reduction spending freeze coupled with higher taxes on the “rich” are dwarfed by healthcare “reform” and energy cap and trade spending programs (both should be scrapped and rewritten) leading to unsustainable deficits and debt and a climate of uncertainty that stifles job creation.
What to Do? Emulate the successes of Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush. Cut taxes and spending*. Keep the Bush tax cuts, reduce corporate and capital gains taxes to 15% or less, freeze all government spending, then cut spending!! Use Citizens Against Government Waste Prime Cuts 2010 (see http://www.cagw.org/reports/prime-cuts/2010/2010-prime-cuts.html) as a guide, saving $350 billion in the first year and over $2 trillion in three years. Scrap the 2009 stimulus and use the unspent money for deficit reduction. For more savings eliminate useless Departments like the Department of Education which has not stopped a decade’s long downward slide in education quality.
These are my Don Quixote, impossible dream, recommendations… given today’s Congressional climate.
Bush did no such thing. He cut taxes and INCREASED entitlement spending.