If you missed Obama’s position on the budget and economy, you can reflect on these comments from well known pundits…
From Larry Kudlow: “President Obama’s harsh-rhetoric rejection of the Ryan budget and his new (presidential) campaign to raise taxes on the rich sets up a huge confrontation with House Republicans on the eve of the hugely important debt-limit expiration.”
From Charles Krauthammer: “I rarely heard a speech by a president so shallow, so hyper-partisan and so intellectually dishonest, outside the last couple of weeks of a presidential election where you are allowed to call your opponent anything short of a traitor. But we’re a year and a half away from Election Day and it was supposed to be a speech about policy.”
From Peter Suderman: “Obama is right to recognize the problem posed by mounting federal debt. But too many of his proposed reforms rely on faith in government to fix its own problems. If fiscal self-rehabilitation were that easy, we wouldn’t be facing a crisis. Government got us into this mess. It’s not going to get us out.”
From Michael Graham: “I can reduce President Barack Obama’s entire speech on debt and deficits to a single phrase: ‘Spending reductions in the tax code.’… It turns out that is Obama’s way of saying ‘tax hike.’… If you found that confusing, the president also referred to his previous deficit reduction. This is odd, given that we’ve doubled our national debt since Obama took office.”
From John Podhoretz: “Lately, Obama watchers of both left and right have been trying to make sense of him and what he believes. I think yesterday he showed us the very core of his conviction — that America is to be morally judged solely on the basis of the services its government delivers.”
From Clive Crook: “There was no sign of anything worth calling a plan to curb borrowing faster than in the budget. He offered no more than a list of headings …The speech was more notable for its militant–though ineffectual–hostility to Republican proposals than for any fresh thinking of its own. It was a waste of breath.”