Last night, the House of Representatives was set to vote on House Speaker John Boehner’s (R–OH) plan to raise the debt ceiling, as the projected August 2 deadline looms. Failing to round up enough votes to secure the bill’s passage, House Republicans closed up shop for the night and are scheduled to reconvene this morning, hoping to bring a bill back to the House floor with enough support to pass, as Politico reports. Inside baseball, last-minute vote wrangling aside, a much larger problem remains: Even if the Boehner bill passed and became law, America would continue its downward spiral into a fiscal abyss with no end in sight.
Why can’t the Congress take these issues seriously? One reason is a lack of presidential leadership. Throughout the debt ceiling debate, President Barack Obama has attempted to portray himself as taking America’s spending crisis head on while calling for “shared sacrifices” to return the country to a course of fiscal sanity. Yet the President has replaced leadership with spectatorship. While the House passes bill after bill on the budget, the President can only carp, while the Senate can only bluster and stew.
Leadership requires speaking plainly and directly to the American people. Instead, the President prefers code to disguise his intentions. To the President, the phrase “shared sacrifices” means tax increases, and his end goal is to keep up his big spending ways. After all, he sees government spending as the best way to create his vision of society in the long term and the best way to spur economic growth in the short run—even though his hundreds and billions of dollars in stimulus spending have left the economy stuck in the mud. Unemployment remains at 9.2 percent, and economic growth is stagnating. The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that U.S. GDP rose at a seasonally adjusted rate of 1.3 percent in the second quarter (lower than economists’ expectations), and first-quarter growth was revised down sharply to a 0.4 percent gain from 1.9 percent.
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