Looking at Obama’s first term, do we see a flaw likely to catch up with him in the second term? It may be that his brilliance at political tactics and partisan maneuver has shrouded from his consciousness the country’s more strategic challenges—most crucially, the monstrous debt overhang bearing down on the nation, currently at sixteen trillion dollars and rising.
This debt now represents more than 70 percent of the country’s GDP. Most experts believe that when it hits 90 percent it will begin to have a seriously deleterious impact on the economy. Every year that that percentage number rises is a year closer to an economic crisis with very high prospects of spinning out of the control of policymakers.
What did Obama do about this in his first term? Nothing good. He added nearly $6 trillion to the national debt by running massive deficits year after year. Then he promised the American people that if the most wealthy Americans would just "pay a little more," the country’s fiscal woes could be seriously ameliorated. Not true.
In fact, the country’s most ominous fiscal problem is out-of-control entitlement spending. But it isn’t clear the president intends to address this problem, and powerful forces within his party are adamantly opposed to any such initiatives.
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