Will Obama ever be able to balance the budget now?

[niceypoo]

I have always told my republican friends that Obama will have the budget balanced by the time he leaves office. Now I am not so sure about it.

[dkf]

1. The middle class tax cuts dwarf the tax cuts for the wealthy.

As soon as he said he wouldn't raise taxes on the middle class he couldn't balance the budget.

[grumgrum]

2. And that is how the GOP won the 2012 election

I'm already looking to 2016 for a real democrat such as Grayson, Weiner, or Feingold..please not Hilary ... she's even more corporate than Obama is a republican

[avaistheone1]

3. He looks like he is well on his way to his own version of a voodoo economics model.

Lotsa luck.

:crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy:

[grumgrum]

4. Based on the Chart posted on DU way back...Obama will be the 1st (D) that has deficits like a (R)

[Davis_X_Machina]

5. Why in the name of all that's holy...

...would you even want to balance the budget in the middle of a massive economic downturn?

Herbert Hoover wasn't a Democrat, O.K.?

[elleng]

8. Zacly. Some things should be off the table for a while.

Coming up with a plan, on the other hand, should STILL be on the table.

[Davis_X_Machina]

10. I think there's no shortage of plans...

...and I'm fond of this one.

But you don't do it now. Although there are as many deficit-fixated loonies here as on Free Republic, it seems some days.

[HuckleB]

11. +1,000,000,000,000!!!

[niceypoo]

17. Because if the budget is not balanced soon, the government will default

and all this will go away as we know it

[sakabatou]

6. Not with the republicans in the House.

[Skink]

7. His own projections factored in the raise in rates.

[laconicsax]

9. Sure he can do it.

There's a lot of stuff in the budget he can cut that the Repubs would gladly agree to.

He could probably completely eliminate the Departments of Education, HHS, Energy, Labor, Veterans Affairs, and Housing and Urban Development without much fuss from the Republicans. I haven't taken the time to look up the numbers, but I'd bet that eliminating those departments along with deep cuts to SS and Medicare could even give him a budget surplus with which he could give the top 2% even bigger tax cuts.

[Hawkowl]

12. No.

No way in hell. It is impossible since the tax cuts caused the budget deficit in the first place. Add on to it the obscene Pentagon budget and then it becomes a snowball's chance in hell. It is literally impossible.

[jeanpalmer]

13. It's an impossibility

He's going in the other direction. After today, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles have to wonder why they wasted their time. Obama is doing the exact opposite of what they recommended.

[MannyGoldstein]

14. Just slash Social Security

Hence Obama's Simpson/Bowled commission.

[Igel]

15. He was going to have the budget balanced?

IIRC, it never got much better than the chart from 2/2009:

http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/26/news/economy/obama_budget_outline/index.htm

The goal was to get the deficit reliably under $500 billion/year late in the second term and keep it there indefinitely, but not under a trillion in 2011, 2012, or even 2013. That, even, made some pretty unrealistic, rosy assumptions that quickly were subjected to some withering criticism.

[FBaggins]

16. Nope... but there was no chance prior to this either.

n/t