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Obama’s Agenda Seen as Dead in the Water by Republicans
By James Rowley & Roxana Tiron - Feb 13, 2013 1:14 PM PT
President Barack Obama last night called for a higher minimum wage and stricter gun laws, proposed making preschool available to all 4-year-olds, and asked Congress to rewrite U.S. immigration law.
Today Republicans in Congress made clear that little of it will happen.
House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and rank-and-file Republicans opposed many of the details Obama set out in his second-term agenda in his State of the Union address to Congress. They signaled that the political fights of the past aren’t over yet.
Boehner dismissed the president’s proposal to raise the federal minimum wage. Republicans also gave a negative response to Obama’s call for new legislation to curb greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists say drives global warming.
“When you raise the price of employment, guess what happens? You get less of it,” Boehner, an Ohio Republican, told reporters at a news conference today in Washington. “Why do we want to make it harder for small employers to hire people?”
In his speech last night to a joint session of Congress, Obama proposed raising the hourly federal minimum wage to its highest inflation-adjusted value since 1981, under President Ronald Reagan, according to a White House fact sheet.
Obama’s speech was a “go-through-the motions laundry list of things” he’d “like to do,” said South Dakota Senator John Thune, a member of the chamber’s Republican leadership.
‘Won’t Pass’
“Minimum wage won’t pass the House, climate-change won’t pass the House,” Thune said. “Those are things he would probably have a hard time getting a lot of Democrats to vote for.”
The same is true for Obama’s call for guaranteeing pre- school programs for all 4-year-olds, he said. “How do you pay for it?” he said. By saying the programs wouldn’t “add a single dime to the deficit” Obama is expecting Congress to raise taxes “to finance all these new programs,” he said.
Senate Democrats seeking re-election next year in states that supported Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 “are going to be hard pressed to vote for” new tax revenue beyond increases that have been passed, Thune said.
More here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-13/obama-s-minimum-wage-increase-dismissed-by-boehner.html
They believe in reparations.
In the Collective the spirit is wanting, the flesh is weak, the mind is weary, it longs for the warm milk of the national tit.
They believe in reparations.
I said Obama's agenda now didn't I?
What's this utopia bunk Vette is yammering about? Any (non-Republican) president who wants to lead America to a better future wants a utopia?
What's this utopia bunk Vette is yammering about? Any (non-Republican) president who wants to lead America to a better future wants a utopia?
In the tactics, son. Study up!
Please don't make me laugh I got chapped lips.
Define for us all exactly what this "better future" looks like.
Ishmael
It's true:
Please don't make me laugh I got chapped lips.
Define for us all exactly what this "better future" looks like.
Ishmael
Obama seems to be setting himself up as the 'cornucopia' from which all blessings flow. Now we're going to see exactly how much political capital he has to spend on making these pipe dreams come true.
At the peak of WWII Roosevelt subsumed 40% of the economy to support the war effort. I doubt that anyone here remembers much about that period but wages were essentially frozen and virtually everything was rationed. Considering the effort that was required to prevail in that conflict the citizens suffered these deficiencies for the survival of the nation. The economy wasn't truly unleashed until after the conflict and war industries returned to peace time production. The WWII debt was paid off by 1952.
Currently the government is subsuming 38.9% of the economy. We aren't at war so there is no real end in sight. Inflationary pressures are mounting daily which in the end threaten to impoverish the greater percentage of the populace. There is no plan to retire any of the debt, merely to incrementally reduce it over an extended period of time and even that is merely a proposal.
Virtually all of the presidents proposals will not only add to the debt, they will further inflame inflationary pressures. If this trend is not reversed, and soon, will will begin to look more like Argentina or Zimbabwe than the United States. The path that the president has chosen is the path that a multitude of nations have taken going back over 4000 years. A path that has impoverished those nations and lead to a general collapse of society. Yet somehow this president believes he can escape the inevitable end that those policies have produced. Not in the interests of the general betterment of the nation, but in the interest of populist politics.
The candy store is running out of sugar.
Ishmael
Define for us all exactly what this "better future" looks like.
Ishmael