American Voters: Still Up for Grabs
American Voters: Still Up for Grabs
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: January 21, 2012
A Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Friday found that two-thirds of Americans would consider voting for a third-party presidential candidate, while 48 percent definitely wanted a third party in the race. Now what does that tell you? It tells you that with the campaign about to go into full swing, as the president delivers his State of the Union address next week, voters are still casting about for a leader with a winning message. I can save both parties a lot of money. I am one of those voters, and I can tell you exactly for whom I want to vote — and I don’t think I’m alone.
I want to vote for a candidate who advocates an immediate investment in infrastructure that will create jobs and upgrade America for the 21st century — ultrafast bandwidth, highways, airports, public schools, mass transit — and combines that with a long-term plan to fix our fiscal imbalances at the real scale of the problem, a plan that could be phased in as the economy recovers.
On the latter point, I am talking about the Bowles-Simpson bipartisan deficit reduction plan — or something equally serious and with a chance of bipartisan support. President Obama has proposed smart infrastructure investments, but he has not paired them with a credible long-term deficit-reduction plan, and the only chance of passage in Congress is to have both. Mitt Romney is not even close.
Christina Romer, the former chairwoman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, put it best when she told this newspaper on Dec. 31 that the U.S. “faces two daunting economic problems: an unsustainable long-run budget deficit and persistent high unemployment. ... Over the next 20 to 30 years, rising health care costs and the retirement of the baby boomers are projected to cause deficits that make the current one look puny. At the rate we’re going, the United States would almost surely default on its debt one day. ... We already have a blueprint for a bipartisan solution. The Bowles-Simpson commission hashed out a sensible plan of spending cuts, entitlement program reforms and revenue increases that would shave $4 trillion off the deficit over the next decade. It shares the pain of needed deficit reduction, while protecting the most vulnerable and maintaining investments in our future productivity,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/opinion/sunday/friedman-american-voters-still-up-for-grabs.html?ref=opinion