Obama Veers Left in Debt Plan

Our southern neighbour's boss drops the gloves for 2012 with the hardest words to say in politics: Tax raise.

U.S. President Barack Obama's promise to trim the country's ballooning debt by $4 trillion (with a 'T') “confronted a topic that is harder to address seriously in public than sex or flatulence: America needs higher taxes,”says Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. His speech, while short on specifics, took aim at military spending and the Bush-era (and Obama-extended) tax breaks, which Kristof applauds as a sign of a maturing president: “We can’t plausibly slash our way back to solid fiscal ground. We need more revenue.”

The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, tut-tuts the highly political tone of the speech, suggesting Obama is playing Johnny-come-lately because “the Republicans outflanked him on fiscal discipline and are now setting the national political agenda.” Republican Congressman Paul Ryan's budget plan has dominated U.S. discourse in recent weeks, and Obama's rejoinder looks like “what some might call the false choice of merely preserving the government we have with no realistic plan for doing so.” Of particular concern to the editorialists are the further cuts to the U.S. defence budget, which “would follow two separate, recent rounds of deep cuts that were supposed to stave off further Pentagon triage amid several wars and escalating national security threats.”

Dan Balz at the Washington Post agrees with the Journal that the speech was aimed at establishing the Democratic line on federal finances ahead of the 2012 election. “This was not a speech about dollars and cents as much as it was an appeal for Americans to think about what kind of country they want and how they define shared sacrifice,” says Balz. And how the parties define that sacrifice – for the GOP, it's cutting government spending and for the Democrats, it's restoring some balance to taxes – is all but guaranteed to frame Obama's re-election effort.