Thursday, June 30, 2011

Bubba Clinton Prepares to Upstage Obama on Debt Issue

You knew this was coming. Bill Clinton wasn't going to let Obama keep the reigns for long without stepping in to work on his legacy. The former, disgraced president says he has a plan to deal with the debt ceiling. Considering Clinton was much better on the economy than Obama, Obama should listen, but he probably won't. (This is not saying Clinton was great on the economy either.)

"If they [the Republicans] said, look, that now is not the time for big tax increases to harm the recovery, they would be right," Clinton told ABC News in an exclusive interview at the Clinton Global Initiative America conference in Chicago. "But it's also right to say that now's not the time for big spending cuts.

"What I'd like to see them do is agree on the outlines of a 10-year plan and agree not to start either the revenue hikes or the spending cuts until we've got this recovery underway," Clinton added. "The confidence that the Republicans say would be given to investors with a budget plan, they'd get whether we started this year or next year or the year after that, for that matter."

"We've got to get the jobs back in this economy again," Clinton said. "The more people we get going back to work, the more businesses we start, that'll bring up the revenue flow, and it will cut down on the expenses. Then, we'll see what the real dimensions of our problem are."


While I disagree with Clinton on the spending cuts, because there is so much pork that needs to go in Washington, he is taking a page from Reagan that in that now is not the time to raise taxes and creating an environment that creates jobs means more people are paying into the tax base, thus it increases. This is better than what Obama is proposing as he has mentioned the ability of new taxes on the rich and on big oil, which of course would be passed on to the poor.

Of course, the taxes too would create a climate that would not benefit job growth. Bubba isn't totally wrong with this one. If you could only convince him to cut spending, he wouldn't have a bad plan.

Of course, you know Obama wants him to go away. Considering Obama's low approval numbers, Democrats may look back to the man they pushed away just three years ago, and Obama doesn't want to share his presidency. This could get interesting.

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