Can President Obama Break His Own Record?

The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 requires the President to submit his budget request for the upcoming fiscal year no later than the first Monday of February.  Obviously, President Obama has missed the deadline this year.  But this is not the first time.  Or the second.  Or the third.  In fact he's one for five in complying with this statutory mandate.  In only his first term, President Obama set the record for the most missed budget deadlines by a single president.  Now, every time he misses the deadline (again) he merely pads is own record.  But that's not the record referenced in the title to this post.  Rather, I'm talking about the number of days by which the deadline is missed.

Before President Obama took office, Bill Clinton was the holder of that record.  In 1993, he missed the budget deadline by sixty-six days -- more than two months!  President George W. Bush with his very first budget missed his deadline (the only deadline he missed) by a whopping sixty-three days!  Impressive you say?  That's child's play for President Obama.  In his very first attempt, President Obama missed his budget deadline by, wait for it . . . ninety-eight days.  While he also has missed three deadlines out of his other four opportunities, he has not yet matched the length of that first prodigious miss.  

Some think that President Obama's ninety-eight day overage is a record that will stand forever, but I'm not ready to give up on him just yet.  Records were made to be broken, and never one to shrink from a challenge, President Obama already has blown through the lengths of his other two budget deadline misses.  So we know for sure that his latest deadline fail will be at least his second longest to date (with three more chances to come)!  True, he'll have to push his budget proposal well into May to break his own record this year, but all evidence suggests that he may be up to the task.  The key to his success appears to be an almost uncanny (lack of) focus:  Don't get bogged down in the details of doing the job.  Instead, travel around the country on the taxpayer dime (racking up more deficits and debt -- another record!) talking about budgets.  

In fact, I think President Obama just might mean never to relinquish this particular record.  I can't confirm this, but I suspect that President Obama, taking a page out of Harry Reid's playbook, may just intend never to submit a proposed budget.  And, after all, why should he?  What has happened to the other budgets he submitted?  The last two haven't garnered a single positive vote.  In either the House or the Senate.  And the Senate has been controlled by the President's own party!  If his own political allies are going to disrespect his budgets like that, why should he submit them?

Anyway, if President Obama pulls a Harry Reid and never proposes another budget, then his own record never can be broken by any subsequent upstart president!  Pure genius.  This president continues to find ways to write himself into the record books.  I don't think anyone can stand in his way this time.  Hail to the Chief!

Skewed Priorities

Some people are working hard to reduce their credit card debt, and that sounds like a good idea, but I'm going to suggest that they are wasting their time.  That credit card debt is a drop in the bucket.  Americans owe $858 billion in credit card debt.  Sounds like a big number you say?  Worthy of your attention you think?  Try this on for size: The national debt is $16.5 trillion.  That's almost 20x all of our credit card debt combined.  Yet those of us with credit card debt fret about it and keep electing officials who are running us into the hole faster than we ever could pay our way out.  The national debt has increased almost $6 trillion during the Obama administration.  That means that every year of the Obama administration, we have added to our national debt almost double our total credit card debt.  So if the entire country had, over the last four years, worked extremely hard and had paid off ALL of our credit card debt, we'd still be about $5 trillion behind where we started.  My point is this:  If you're not worried about the national debt, then forget about your credit card debt -- that's chicken feed by comparison.  If your credit card debt is keeping you up at night, then you should really be pulling your hair out over the national debt.  Quit wasting your time trying to reduce your credit card debt and get yourself educated so that you can turn out the bums who keep running up your much larger national debt.  Better yet, get started paying off both.