The downgrading of the U.S credit rating

Last Friday August 5th 2011, Standard and Poor’s downgraded the United States’ credit rating from a AAA credit that it has held since 1917 to a AA+.
“Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.” This is a quotation of what the reason Standard and Poor’s gave for the downgrade.
Many Republicans took offense with this because they felt that Standard and Poor had no right to set policy. The entity was not setting policy, it was just basing itself on facts.
As one who believes in facts I have to agree with Standard and Poor’s reasoning.
What we went through during the last few weeks in Washington was inadmissible.
As a big supporter of President Obama is was very disappointed in his leadership. Although he found himself trapped in a situation that was not of his creation, my concern is his willingness in compromising too soon. He did that last December with the extension of the tax cuts, he did the same thing with a single payer health care system . He came across as a weak head of government.
As a big sport fan I look at a leader of a team putting the team on his shoulders, like Kobe Bryant does with the Lakers and Dwain Wade does with Miami Heat, both basketball teams.
When it’s time to deliver, that is when they show up to push the team over the hump.
I don’t think that President Obama has that particular talent. Maybe because he thinks that he should stay above the quarreling of the Congress.
We also now see the candidates, or suspects like a friend of mine would call them, for president on the republican side trying to blame the White House for the downgrading. They must think that most of the country will forget that this president inherited the whole that we are in. This is another reason for disappointment with President Obama, President Reagan kept talking about what he inherited even in his speech at the 1988 Republican Party, so that the country would not forget. President Obama should talk about this every time he addresses the nation. What’s most ironic is what this candidates are proposing is more of what got us in the ditch in the first place, deregulation, more tax cuts for what the republican party these days calls “job creators”, and what we used to call in the past “the wealthy”. It is also amazing is that they never look at what needs to be done to cure the problems we are in. It’s like having a patient with cancer and telling him to take two aspirins and then see how he feels in the morning.
I don’t consider myself an optimist, but I am not a pessimist either. I like to look at myself as a realist, but the future of this nation does not look good. Those days when our representatives used to challenge the population by telling us that the country should put a man in the moon and bring him back safely are long gone. Back then the “job creators”, although they have not been creating jobs for over a decade even when their taxes were lowered, used to pay 70% of their income in taxes; when we could afford to raise seniors from poverty by providing them Social Security first, and then years later, Medicare. When we also created the largest middle class the world had ever seen by having the G.I. Bill, giving people who returned from WWII a college education. Now we want to protect the “job creators” wealth at the expense of pushing grandma and the college students under the bus. Members of the same party are cutting funds in every state that they got their hands on, such as Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, and New Jersey, and labeling teachers as bullies, cutting their rights, saying that they make too much money, then turning around and passing on the savings in the way of massive tax cuts for their wealthy contributors. Those teachers that are so terrible are educating our young generation, the future of this country.
When I used to live in Argentina, many years ago, we would always say that every country has the government that it deserves. I later discovered that the same saying also exists in English. That is exactly how I feel about the government we have these days in the U.S.