by Bill Rice
Obama brought an enormous agenda to the table in Tuesday's speech. Obama heralded Congress for delivering his economic stimulus package by President's day, but is not ready to stop.
Quickly rattling off the campaign promises that this first piece of legislation satisfied--projected creation of 3.5 million jobs and 95% of working households receiving a tax cut--he moved to set the forward pace. Again, calling for bipartisan support for the next leg of his recovery agenda--acknowledging skepticism that his plan will work.
President Obama reiterated his focus on breaking a "destructive cycle" of tightening credit, shaken confidence, and job loss. His speech set out to explain the governments efforts to re-start lending, prevent foreclosures, and restore confidence in banking. His statements stressed accountability, but warned it would continue to require significant Federal (taxpayer) resources.
In addition, to selling the recent economic stimulus Obama set forth new agenda items. Prefacing his coming budget agenda he outlined three major challenges:health care reform, energy independence, and expansion of education. Adding these priorities to an already swelling legislative agenda and ballooning national deficit, left some asking what isn't onObama's task list.
Obama's promises to continue funding the economic and banking recovery and adding three major budgetary requirements to the mix, drove many analyst to consult their calculators to understand the final promise of the evening--"cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office."
However, to prevent debate he announced he had already identified $2 trillion in waste he is looking to slash:
"In this budget, we will end education programs that don't work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them. We'll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we're not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don't use. We will root out the waste fraud, and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn't make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas."
President Obama left a big agenda behind in the chambers of Congress. The remaining two questions left in most American's mind on Wednesday are: Is it too much? And will it work?
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