I wonder if this is the verdict on Obama’s attempt to explain why we  need tax increases as part of deficit reduction.

Well it gets a little better. Google news now has reference to The Los Angeles Times story Obama pressures Republicans on federal debt ceiling.

The news conference represented a rare instance of Obama using the presidential megaphone to defend his position. In the past, the president has been prone to delivering lengthy answers in a professorial tone, relying on abstract ideas. By contrast, Obama on Wednesday laid out his arguments in simple, everyday terms, echoing an ex-president that he has been studying: Ronald Reagan.

I guess I am not the only one to notice how rarely Obama uses his opportunities to influence the tenor of the debate

My comment on this story was:

Obama flubbed it again. He failed to make the point that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy are job killers. Having missed that opportunity, Boehner made his usual silly point that rescinding those tax cuts is the jobs killer.

With those tax cuts, the wealthy are free to (and have) sucked that money right out of the economy. They (among other things) either invest it overseas and export jobs, or they lend the money back to the government by buying Treasury securities. Rather than invest it in the economy, they have just given it back to the government, but expect to be paid interest now. I don’t blame the wealthy for doing this. It would be silly to invest in more capacity without having enough market demand to sell what the new capacity would produce.

Had this money been put into the hands of the middle-class, they would have spent more of it than the wealthy do. This spending would draw forth investment in capacity (job creation) to meet the economic demand from the middle-class. This is absolutely essential if we are to get a self-sustaining economic recover with lower unemployment.

With just a stimulus to create demand, the recovery will require more and more deficits and never sustain itself without government help.

In the article The Debt Limit Option President Obama Can Use,  Bruce Bartlett latches on to the part of the Fourth Amendment to the Consitution which he quotes as “The validity of the public debt of the United States…shall not be questioned.”

You can look it up.

Bartlett says, “it’s worth remembering that the debt limit is statutory law, which is trumped by the Constitution.”

The article Right to Rent: Will the Obama Administration Finally Fix Housing? by Dean Baker explains the concept as follows:

The concept of “right to rent” has been floating around Washington for almost four years. Under this proposal, foreclosed homeowners would be allowed to remain in their house as renters, paying the market rent, for a substantial period of time (e.g. five years) following a foreclosure. While several bills have been introduced in Congress, President Obama may now have a new opportunity to take the lead on this issue.

I had no idea that such a proposal existed when I wrote my post Solution to The Housing Market Crash with a vaguely similar idea.

Much as I would like to agree with Tom Tomorrow and much as I dislike Obama’s twisting of words, I have to agree with “Chuckles” The Sensible Woodchuck’s final comment.

When you take a policy that might be justifiable in limited circumstances and then apply it outside its limits, you may be overthinking it.

In the above video clip, Senator Harry Reid finally starts saying the things that have been needed to be said since the first days of the Obama administration.

Imagine the position of strength that Obama would have been in today had he been explaining for years why the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would prevent the economic recovery from being self-sustaining. When his stimulus package kept us from going over the cliff, but then faltered as it ran out, he could have then said, “OK, time to stop fooling around. The Bush tax cuts have to go.”

Obama could have claimed that things worked out just as he predicted rather than now being in a position where the Republicans claim that what he tried is a failure.

Instead, we find ourselves with the Republicans solidly entrenched with the idea that tax increases are unacceptable. It is going to be 100 times harder to root them out of this position than it would have been if they were never allowed to dig in in the first place.

As a candidate Obama was a man of big ideas and foresight. As a President, he has been a man of little ideas and no foresight beyond the next day. What happened?