Barack Obama Quotes
We are not a deadbeat nation.
A minority group of very conservative members of the House of Representatives had decided to hold America’s full faith and credit and the economy hostage to implementing their minority proposal to reduce government spending more than the majority wanted shortly after the 2012 election where the voters had rejected the conservative position. None the less, they were threatening to force the government to default and not pay for the items that the Congress had previously already approved by not approving a debt ceiling increase. The President was determined not to negotiate with “hostage takers” and making sure that America paid its bills for the money spent as authorized by Congress.
Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States (Democrat, IL), United States Senator (Democrat, IL), Press Conference, January 14, 2013
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This is the kind of advice that Presidents have given the Congress for years. What makes this quotation noteworthy is the person who made the statement, President George W. Bush. It was made in the 7th year of his Presidency which had in those 7 years, at his urging, gone from a balanced budget and a national surplus projected, to the largest deficit of any nation in history and a projected deficit that even dwarfed that. So the irony of the quotation was that the politician who produced the largest economic burden on future generations was lecturing other politicians on the evils of doing exactly what he himself had been doing. Bush, if nothing else, was one of the most audacious politicians in this respect, though his most severe detractors claim that he did not have the intellectual perspective to even understand the hypocrisy of his quotation,
In 1992 Colorado passed a Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, known as TABOR that requires that spending increases get voter approval and the state refunds surpluses through a series of tax cuts. So the state ended up with the problem that Zelinski described.
Historically, this is the occasion where the war debt from the Revolution and the War of 1812 was paid off. It was one of the few times that the nation was debt free.
The Republicans who had control of the House of Representatives were reaching the end of the fiscal year and had not yet passed a budget nor expanded the debt ceiling so the government would have to shut down in a few days and a little later America could not pay any of its bills. They had a very strong position if they willing to blackmail the Democratically controlled Senate and the Democratic President. But the last time the Republicans had ever tried this before was the Republican House when Gingrich was speaker and they shut down the government for almost 3 weeks. It cost the Republicans the next election’s majority in the House. President Obama decided that he would not set a precedent of negotiating with a house of Congress that was threatening to shut down the government or threatening not to pay the nation’s bills which Congress had already authorized the purchase of.
Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician and attorney who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.
