American Idol Would Have Been Way Better Than This

Man, what a snooze-fest. Then again, most of these are, so can't fault him for that.

One little itsy bitsy comment though did stand out to me. The question was whether or not he would accept a budget from the Senate that didn't include his middle class tax rebates and Cap-and-Trade system in it. He didn't really provide a simple answer (not suprised at that - what politician does?), but what stood out to me though was when he said:

I expect that there's serious efforts at health care reform, and that we are driving down costs for families and businesses, and ultimately for the federal and state governments that are going to be broke if we continue on the current path.

(emphasis mine)

So let me see if I have this straight. The current plan is not working and will go broke at some point in the future. The country is technically broke now overall, and if you continue with this budget we'll be even more broke and our money will be worth less. So you're saying that you'd rather be broker-than-broke NOW, rather than broker-than-broke IN THE FUTURE??

I mean, we are 100% guaranteed to have to print money in order to pay for these programs (the health care is just one of them, but is the one highlighted in the quote above) because there's not enough money around. So he's trying to convince us that it's better to devalue our currency and definitely be broke now with the hope that it will pay off in the long run.

Hmm; guaranteed brokeness now vs. waiting to see if there's a better idea to, I dunno, maybe AVOID the whole broke situation?!?.

If the Medicare/Medicaid Trusts were going to die in a week or two, then maybe there'd be some justification for pulling out all stops and getting crazy with the currency. But it's not. Current estimates are that Medicare will go broke sometime around 2018. I'm not saying we should do nothing; I'm saying that it's not urgent we do THIS now.

Ok, I fibbed - there was one other comment that irked me. Here was the question posed:

At both of your town hall meetings in California last week, you said, quote, "I didn't run for president to pass on our problems to the next generation." But under your budget, the debt will increase $7 trillion over the next 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office says $9.3 trillion. And today on Capitol Hill, some Republicans called your budget, with all the spending on health care, education and environment, the most irresponsible budget in American history.

Isn't that kind of debt exactly what you were talking about when you said passing on our problems to the next generation?

To which he replied:

First of all, I suspect that some of those Republican critics have a short memory, because as I recall, I'm inheriting a $1.3 trillion deficit, annual deficit, from them.

Hogwash. Let's remember, Mr. Short Term Memory, that for the last two years of Bush's 2nd term the Democrats controlled Congress. Now don't misunderstand; while Congress was under Republican control, they were rabid spenders and went against conservative spending policies. Recently, however, Republicans seem to have recently had an epiphany about what sort of fiscal values they're supposed to have and have begun to take a stand. Now, whether it's because of determination to be the biggest obstacle they can be or because it's genuine is irrelevant to me. (for the record, I believe it is not genuine...'genuine' and 'politics' don't really work well together...) For now though, they're on my side (most of them).

However, let's pretend the actual deficit inherited was zero. It's still going to be almost $2 trillion by year's end!! With those kind of numbers, who cares what the deficit was when he "inherited" it!?!

C'mon!